This week, it was my turn to set the #WOW2023 challenge for ‘retro’ month, and I chose to revisit a challenge from May 2017, that was originally set by one of the original ‘founders’ of WorkoutWednesday, Emma Whyte.

The original challenge looked like this :

As I said in the challenge post, I chose this I this challenge as it’s a different type of visual we don’t often see in WOW; it uses a different dataset that interests me – wine!; and as Emma’s website, where she hosted the original requirements for her challenges, is no longer active, it’s possible many won’t know of the existence of this challenge (it pre-dates the current WOW tracking data we have).

Building the core viz

Firstly, we want to build out the basic grid. For that we need a couple of calculated fields

Display:Taster

‘Taster ‘ + STR([Taster])

and

Icon

IF [Score Type] = ‘Grape’ THEN “https://workout-wednesday.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Grapes.png”
ELSE “https://workout-wednesday.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Globe.png”
END

Right click on the Icon field and select Image Role > URL

Add Wine Type, Wine and Icon to Columns and Display:Taster to Rows

Change the mark type to square.

Here we’re making use of the image role functionality in the header of the table to display images stored on the web, without the need to download them locally.

Create a new field

Colour

IF [Score] = 1 THEN [Wine Type]
ELSEIF Score = 0 THEN ‘Grey’
ELSE ‘Neutral’
END

Add this to the Colour shelf and adjust colours accordingly. Increase the size of the squares so they fill the space better, but still have separation between them.

Set the background colour of the worksheet to the grey/beige (#f6f6f4).

Note – I noticed later on that the colour legend in the screen shots has the words ‘correct’ and incorrect’ rather than ‘red’ and ‘grey’. This was due to an un-needed alias I had set against the field, so please ignore

Via the Analysis -> Totals menu, add all subtotals & also show row grand totals. This will make the display look a bit odd initially.

Right-click on the Wine pill in the Columns and uncheck the Subtotals option. This should mean there are 3 additional columns only – a total for each wine type and the grand total.

To get a single square to display in the totals columns, right-click on the Colour field in the marks card area, and change from a dimension to an attribute. The field will change from displaying Colour to ATTR(Colour) and an additional option for * will display in the colour legend – set this to be white

To change the word ‘Total’ in the heading to ‘Score’, right click on the word ‘Total’ and select format. In the left hand pane, change the Label of the Totals section to Score. Repeat for the ‘Grand Totals’ by right clicking on ‘Grand Totals’ in the table, selecting format and changing the label for that too to ‘Overall Score’.

We need to label the totals with the score. For this we first need to get a score for each taster per wine

Score Per Taster

{FIXED [Taster], [Wine Type]:SUM([Score])}

If we just added this to the Label shelf, every square gets labelled with the total, which isn’t what we want.

We need to work out a way to just show the label on the total columns only. For this we can make use of the SIZE() table calculation.

To see how we’re going to use this, double click into the Columns and type SIZE(), then change the field to be a blue discrete pill. Edit the table calculation and set the field to compute by Wine and Icon only.

You’ll see that the SIZE() field in the Columns has added the number 12 as part of the heading, which is the count of wines associated to the wine type (ie 12 red wines and 12 white wines). There is no SIZE() value displayed under the total columns, but these actually have a size of 1, so we’re going to exploit this to display the labels (note – this approach wouldn’t work if where was only 1 wine for one of the wine types).

Score on Total

IF SIZE() = 1 THEN SUM([Score Per Taster]) END

Set the default number format of this field to be Standard, which means the result will display either whole or decimal numbers.

Add this onto the Label shelf instead of the other field, and adjust the table calculation as described above to compute by Wine and Icon only.

You can now remove the SIZE() field from the Columns.

Align the scores centrally.

Remove row & column dividers from each cell, and the totals, but set a white column divider for both the pane & header of the Grand Total column.

Format the text for the Wine Type and Wine and Totals fields. Align the text for the Wine field to the Top.

Hide field labels for rows and columns.

Applying the Tooltip

The text when hovering over each square needs to display different wording depending on the score.

Tooltip – Score Text

IF [Score] = 1 THEN ‘correctly identified’
ELSEIF [Score] = 0.5 THEN ‘partially identified’
ELSE ‘was unable to identify’
END

Add this to the Tooltip shelf along with the Score Type field. Modify the text accordingly

Applying the sort

To control the sorting, we need a parameter

pSort

string parameter with list options, defaulted to ‘Overall Score’

and we also need fields to capture the different scores for each type of wine per taster

Red Score

{FIXED [Taster]:SUM( IF [Wine Type] = ‘Red’ THEN [Score] END)}

White Score

{FIXED [Taster]:SUM( IF [Wine Type] = ‘White’ THEN [Score] END)}

Overall Score

[White Score] + [Red Score]

Then we need a calculated field to drive sorting based on the option selected and the fields above

Sort By

CASE [pSort]
WHEN ‘Overall’ THEN [Overall Score]
WHEN ‘Red’ THEN [Red Score]
ELSE [White Score]
END

Then right click on the Display:Taster field on the Rows and select Sort, and amend the values to sort by field Sort By descending

Building the legend

I did this using 2 sheets. First I created a new field

Legend Text

IF [Score] = 1 THEN ‘Correct’
ELSEIF Score = 0 THEN ‘Incorrect’
ELSE ‘Partially Correct’
END

Then I create a viz as follows

• Add Legend Text and Wine Type to Columns
• Add Legend Text to Filter and set to ‘Correct’
• Change Mark type to Square and increase size
• Add Colour to Colour shelf
• Add Score as AVG to Label and format to number standard. Align centrally
• Uncheck show header against the Wine Type field , and hide field labels for columns against the ‘legend Text’ column heading.
• Remove all column/row dividers and set the worksheet background colour.
• Turn off tooltips

Duplicate the sheet, and edit the filter so it excludes Correct instead. Remove Wine Type from the columns shelf. Reorder the columns.

Building the dashboard

When building the dashboard, I just used a floating image object to add the bottle & glass image in the top left of the dashboard.

I set the background colour of the whole dashboard to match that I’d set on the worksheets too.

To stop the tooltips from displaying when hovering over the Scores, I simply placed floating blank objects over the score columns – this is a simple, but effective trick – you just need to be mindful of the placement if you ever revisit the dashboard and move objects around. I placed a floating blank over the legends too to stop them being clicked on.

My published viz is here!

Happy vizzin’!

Donna