1. Applying visual best practices
Hello again! This dataset on video game sales from 1980 to 2010 will let us take a tour through gaming history!
During this course you will answers questions like:
what is the most sold video game, or which gaming genre was the most popular in the early 2000's? You could even filter for your old favorite video game to see how many other people enjoyed it!
The data structure looks straightforward: You have the name of the game, the platform it was released on like the Wii, Gameboy, or Playstation. We have the year the game was released, the genre, the publisher, and finally the sales in million by region. Note sales does not refer to the sales in Dollar or Euro, but to the amount or copies of video games sold.
Before we continue let's make sure we understand the term release year correctly. Pokemon Blue and Red for example was released in 1996, meaning that all sales for Pokemon Blue and Red get attributed to the year 1996.
We are interested in comparing the sales across all regions. Let's start by dragging Release year to columns and global sales to rows. We see a line chart appearing of global sales over time. We can add the other regions by creating a dual axis graph. In order to create this graph we can drag any measure such as North America sales to the right until a dotted line appears and release.
That's a great start but we see that our axes are not synchronized. We can fix this by clicking synchronize axes, and now the 700 on the right axis aligns with the 700 on the left axis. Let's make it very clear before we add the other regions that global sales is the sum of all the other regions sales, by making it into a bar chart using the marks card.
The best way to add these other regions is by dragging measure values on top of North America sales. This field here, Measure Values, refers to all 6 measures above, so when dragging this on top of NA sales, it gets replaced by all six measures. The first line you see in red is the count of video games - sales dot csv, is a count of the amount of rows from the dataset and can be removed because it is irrelevant. We can remove it by dragging it out of the measure values card. Secondly we have global sales in here as well, which is already visible on the bar chart, so we remove this one too.
We can clean up the graph by firstly renaming the worksheet to All Regions - Sales. We center the title and hide the right axis as it doesn’t add any value, by unticking Show Header. Finally we can rename the left axis title to Global Video Game Sales (in million).
When hovering over the graph we see this little window pop up. That window is called the tooltip. We can improve this by having it automatically show the sales for all regions. Let's drag EU, Global, Japan, North America, and Other Sales to tooltip. There we have it - now all measures are visible! We can still format the tooltip to make it look nicer, but we will leave that to you to explore during the exercises.
2. Let's practice!