July 2020 Summaries

In the face of overwhelming clickbait news about COVID-19, creating a data-informed dashboard can provide a calmer way to stay updated, and using Google Sheets alongside Apache Superset offers a streamlined method for building these dashboards without extensive coding. The process involves using Google Sheets for data acquisition, cleaning, and storage by leveraging a custom script called ImportJSON to fetch and format data from the COVID-19 API. This data is then connected to Apache Superset for visualization and deployment, with the integration facilitated by the gsheets-db-api plugin, allowing Superset to interact with Google Sheets. The tutorial outlines steps for setting up Google Sheets to automatically update data and integrate it into Superset for creating and saving visualizations, despite some limitations such as slower query execution compared to traditional databases. This approach is particularly suited for smaller datasets, and users can further customize their dashboards by exploring different COVID data attributes or integrating additional APIs.

Apache Superset is an open-source business intelligence tool that enables users to create charts and dashboards without needing expertise in data infrastructure, SQL, or visualization grammars. The post guides users on how to create time-series bar charts using the Superset UI, emphasizing the importance of shaping data effectively for visualization. Superset supports various data sources, including Google Sheets, though the latter is still in beta and recommended for smaller datasets due to slower query performance. Users are instructed on how to navigate the Explore UI to customize their visualizations, selecting data sources, visualization types, and using the Time and Query panes to refine their charts. The blog post provides detailed steps for creating both single and multiple variable time-series bar charts, using Google Sheets as an example data source, and encourages users to explore further options in Superset for advanced analytics and annotations.

Funnel charts are widely used in business settings to understand conversion, drop-off, and performance, with sales teams analyzing prospects and marketing teams looking at signup and activation funnels. These visualizations foster team alignment by providing a shared context and encouraging discussion, often being more effective than storytelling or metric setting. Simple bar charts are accessible and offer a quick overview, ideal for presentations, but they fall short in encouraging deeper analysis. Multiple bar charts improve comparative analysis over different time periods, facilitating discussions on performance fluctuations, while Sankey diagrams offer a detailed map of user flows, promoting nuanced discussions and specific interventions. However, Sankey diagrams can be overwhelming without proper design and training, and they require significant visual space, making cross-time-period comparisons challenging. The choice of visualization type should align with the audience's needs and the questions intended to be addressed, with future considerations for designing effective dashboards that integrate multiple visualization styles to enhance data storytelling.

Superset has undergone significant improvements in its visualization plugin development process, making it easier for developers to create and integrate new plugins. Previously, the development process was too complex for many, but recent enhancements, driven by Superset Improvement Proposals (SIPs), have simplified this by overhauling the visualization architecture and making it more community-friendly. The "Hello, World" plugin serves as a basic template for users to start building custom visualizations with a choice of libraries such as ECharts or D3. This process involves using a Yeoman generator to create a plugin scaffold, which includes comprehensive inline documentation, control input examples, and a React component setup. Additionally, new plugin development no longer requires writing Python code and can be handled in a single repository with safer CSS styles, improving accessibility and integration. Future developments aim to support dynamic imports, allowing plugins to be hosted independently and integrated into Superset configurations with ease.