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How I Made That: Searchable Time Series Chart

When there are too many options or categories, it can be helpful to make the data searchable.

The How I Made That series describes the process behind a graphic and includes code and data to work with.

This was the last chart in a series of charts about shifting proportions of the sexes. After focusing on specific aspects of the data, I wanted to provide a way for people to look up their own jobs or any other job they were interested in.

With over 450-ish occupations, listing all the jobs or putting them in a dropdown menu didn’t make sense. It would take up too much space. A search bar on the other hand, lets someone immediately zoom in, which brought me to this:

 

This is how I made that.

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About the Author

Nathan Yau is a statistician who works primarily with visualization. He earned his PhD in statistics from UCLA, is the author of two best-selling books — Data Points and Visualize This — and runs FlowingData. Introvert. Likes food. Likes beer.