Fast Data

With the economy still in a tough spot, I was curious to see how much money is spent across every major sport in the United States. Being a huge baseball, football, and basketball fan, I really wanted to see who spends the most money on payroll and who is the highest paid player in all sports. Feel free to play around with this visualization. The insights I found were really interesting and it's amazing how much money there is in sports across the United States. We definitely love our sports and we're willing to pay big bucks for entertainment. Hover over the "Information" icon to get more details on how to interact with this visualization. My insights and analysis are below this visualization. <a href="undefined"><img alt=" " src="http://public.tableausoftware.com/static/images/Sp&am...

Lately, it seems there has been an explosion with infographics. The ability to visually and effectively convey data is growing in importance. It's not enough to just show data, but to do so in a way that demands attention. And hopefully, spurs action. Best way to present and to show data - use an interactive infographic . This infographic does a great job of explaining what it is and how to make it go viral: Created by Customer Magnetism, an award winning Internet marketing agency.

I decided to enter The Tableau Interactive Biz Viz Contest and since I needed to use a financial data set, I chose to compare Apple vs Microsoft Stock Performance. Having been a big Microsoft fan back in the 90's, I thought it'd be interesting to compare Microsoft against the hottest company at the moment, Apple. Both companies have had interesting peaks and valleys. While Microsoft has been on the decline, Apple has been on a tear. It was interesting to look at the historical min, max, average stock price, and average volume of the two stocks. I then calculated the % daily difference to see the changes in close price compared to the prior day. Then I took it a step further by looking at the % difference by year using the adjusted closing (which takes into account any dividends/stock splits). It was neat to see the % difference by month too. Another way to look at the data was to construct a candlestick chart to see the high, low, open, and close each day. And to see the...