Let’s Get Visual! Visualization Best Practices

I make a lot of reports and I’m always looking for ways to make better and more efficient reports. I recently read The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte and found it illuminating. Although the book is often heavy in theory, its use of clear prose and myriad of examples – both historic and present – made me more introspective about the reports I create. Anyone who uses visuals in their work could benefit from reading Tufte’s book. In this post I’ll talk about my takeaways from the book.

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Fun With FOIA: How I Created a City of Chicago FOIA Dashboard using Power BI

I was inspired by my colleague Neal Levin’s recent blog posts where he combined his passion for data and insights with interests in other areas. I’m passionate about government transparency so I wanted to see if I could build a dashboard that would shed some light on the City of Chicago’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests using Power BI.

This blog walks through how I built my solution. I plan to do a follow up post on the insights.

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