Today we had to find data relating to the period before and after the UK referendum and visualize the results. However, the impact of COVID 19, the ongoing war in Ukraine, global inflation,  food and energy shortages have resulted in Brexit not being the most important issue facing the UK at the moment. This made it difficult to find survey data on Brexit alone, so after scouring the internet for information for almost 2 hours, I finally decided to use the available information and focus on Brexit, immigration and Asylum, and welfare benefits.

I had to transform the data in Tableau Prep. I first had to union 5 tables to collate all the data for all the available regions in the UK. The Excel tables were wide and short, so I had to pivot the resulting unioned table.

Bringing the table into Tableau and visualising the data was very enlightening. The peaks and drops in the line chart piqued my curiosity and sent me off googling to see what had triggered those reactions. Without fail, there was evidence and an explanation on the news corresponding to the sharp shifts that stood out in the chart.

I've seen annotations being used on dashboards, but I'd never got to use them until today. I had to share my findings and they were spot on for this. The presentation was different today because it had a touch of investigative journalism to it. It exemplified the unique way you're able to gain insights and tell stories from data outside of the usual business and financial concerns.

If you were wondering how to annotate a mark, right click on the mark, scroll down to annotate, hover over it and choose one of the three options: mark, point or area depending on what you're trying to accomplish. In my case, I used the mark option. You can then right click on the text box that Tableau has created and either select edit to change the text being shown, or format to apply changes to both your font, line and text box background. You can also resize the box by selecting one of the handles (green squares) and dragging until you get the size you want.