As a means of learning about data and the various ways to express and visualize it, our assignment for the week was to take a random city and map out its high temperature over the course of a year. I was assigned Phoenix, and I found that in the year 2011, the city certainly had it’s fair share of sweltering days. While the temperature dipped to a high of 44 degrees in February and a high of 55 degrees in December, it hit it’s peak in the dog days of Summer, topping out at a burning 118 degrees on the second day of July.

Though the instructions very appreciatively spelled out every step of the way, I had some trouble labeling an individual data point (Feb. 2 & Dec. 13) on my graph. Every time I clicked the individual point and tried to add a data label, it added a label to every point on the graph. Eventually, I subverted this by messing with the label in the Format -> Data Series on my tabs, and manually inserted them that way. With the exception of that however, the assignment was smooth sailing.

Overall, I truly enjoyed working with a medium that I haven’t spent much time on previously. Though Excel is fairly straight forward in learning the basics, I had never worked with its chart visualizations before, so that was an entirely new concept to me. I see its use and practical applications, and as WRUF’s website turns toward data visualization for sports-related stories, I think my understanding of the subject will go a long way toward helping improve the website.