With this MicroStrategy Dashboard, we can easily answer the 5 questions from our data set, Income Tax Data.
1. Which of the 3 Stages in the US that have the most number of Counties? (Attributes: State Postal Code, County Name)
To find the state which has the most number of counties, we used State Postal Code and County Name as attributes. The reason why we used Heat Map instead of a pie chart is because the United States has 51 states. The pie chart is not a proper visualization tool to find a proportion because we would have to divide up the pie chart into 51 slices and the slices would be difficult to compare visually. However, heat map can present 51 states using many rectangular shapes; this way it is easy to find the top 3 states.
This chart shows the state which has the most number of counties in the top left corner and the state with the second-most number of counties is just below the top left corner. The states are ranked in this order from top to bottom then left to right. At the end, the state which has the lowest number of counties is located at the right bottom corner. Because of this ordered presentation, we can easily find out the top 3 states in terms of the number of counties which are Texas, Georgia, Virginia. We can also easily find the number of counties as well by moving the cursor to a block representing the state where we want to know the number of the counties. For example, as you can see in the picture above, Iowa has 100 counties in its state. We learned that this chart is better at presenting a large number of divisions than a pie chart.
2. What are the top 5 State that have the highest Wages and Salaries Income? (Attribute: State Postal Code; Metric: Wages and Salaries Income)
To answer this question, we used the attribute State Postal Code and metric Wages and Salaries Income. We also used Bar Graph to illustrate for the question due to the data required. The vertical axis shows the number of income generated in each of these top states while the horizontal axis shows the state postal code by alphabet order.
By looking at this graph, we can tell the top 5 states in the U.S that have the highest wages and salaries income and how much income each state has. For example, California (CA) stands in the top of generating wages and salaries income every year with average of $1.34 billion and Texas (TX) ranks after CA with $7.75 million.
3. Which state is doing better in generating adjusted gross income between Florida and California? (Attribute: State postal code; Metric: Adjusted Gross income)
We used Adjusted Gross Income for metric and State Postal Code for attribute to answer this question. We chose Pie Graph for this question because it helps us easy to compare between CA (California) and FL (Florida) about their Adjusted Gross Income made in each state. The conclusion and insight we can draw from the visualization is from the pie graph we can see that CA have a higher Adjusted Gross Income than FL with 68.06% compare to 31.94%. Although, FL is a tourist destination but they still have less Adjusted Gross Income than CA, which is 36.12%. In conclusion, looking at the pie graph we can see that CA is doing better than FL.
4. How much interest does each county receive within New Hampshire? (Attribute: County Name; Metric: Interest Received)
To get the insight from the dataset in terms of interest received for any given state of the U.S, in this situation, New Hampshire, we used County Name (New Hampshire) for Attribute and Interest Received (New Hampshire) for Metric. The Scatter Plot Chart was selected instead of other types of visualization because it enables viewers to get a quick comparison of interest received between a large numbers of counties. Each dot represents a county with specific position in the chart that reflects how high/low each county’s received interest amount is.
By looking at the graph, the interest received amount of each county in New Hampshire is shown as well as comparison can be made between these counties. For example, there are 4 counties likely to have similar interest received such as Belknap County, Carroll County, Cheshire County and Strafford County. Besides, Hillsborough County has the highest interest received among all counties in New Hampshire. These are some conclusions can be withdraw from the visualization. Moreover, the big difference between highest and lowest county’s interest received (Coos County and Hillsborough County) can be analyzed to find out the reasons in order to adjust or fix any error that maybe occurs when doing tax return. It can be an insight from analyzing the chart.
5. What are the top 5 counties that have the lowest number of exemptions in California? (Attribute: County Name; Metric: Number of Exemptions)
We used County Name as Attribute and Number of Exemptions as Metric to answer this question. Also, we used Bar Graph to illustrate for the question due to the data required. The vertical axis shows the County Name, and the horizontal axis shows the Number of Exemptions. We decided to choose the bar graph for this question instead of the other types of visualization because we can choose to see the number of counties that have the lowest/highest number of exemptions in California.
With this graph, we can easily choose to see the top 5 counties that have the lowest Number of Exemptions. Thus, we can see that those 5 counties are Alpine County, Modoc County, Mono County, Sierra County, and Trinity County. Also, you can change the number of counties in the stage you want to see. In conclusion, we learn that bar graph is better at presenting the top highest/lowest number of objectives that you want to see than any other types of visualization.
