How I Made That  /  ,

How I Made That: Searchable Time Series Chart

By Nathan Yau

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.

To access this full tutorial and download the source code you must be a member. (If you are already a member, log in here.)

Join Now

Membership

Gain instant access to step-by-step visualization courses and tutorials for insight and presentation — all while supporting an independent site. Source code and data is included so that you can more easily apply what you learn in your own work.

Members also recieve a weekly newsletter, The Process, which looks more closely at the tools, the rules, and the guidelines and how they work in practice.

See samples of everything you gain access to:

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.