So our dashboard week is a little weird as it’s not on a single week but taking part whenever we can due to the amount of bank holiday’s we have during our 4 months training.

Today we were looking at baby name data using a tool that none of us had ever used before: Flourish. So what do I think about it

• It uses pre-built templates that you put your data into, this makes building a simple chart simple (if you have the data in the right format)
• However, this also means that you often have to prepare the data separately for EVERY single chart to make it in the right format for each template
• Additionally, the fact that they are pre-built means that there is limited room to adapt the charts to what you want. There was a lots of things that I wanted to do but just couldn’t do
• It doesn’t deal well with big data sets. I first created a data set with 250k rows and it just didn’t work. I was reading up on some of the examples and it recommended to use 10k or less rows.
• Their animations are great to look at and can be really impressive.

In doing this, I created a few charts to see how it works. Here is what I came up with: