So there’s a ‘thing’ in the Tableau twitter community called Makeover Monday.  It encourages people to review an existing visualisation and create their own – either by finding a new way of presenting the data, or taking the raw data and going off at an entirely different tangent.

The data each week is posted on the Makeover Monday website, which is curated by Andy (@vizwizbi) and Eva (@trimydata) – who get a huge number of submissions each week!

I never seem to find the time to do my entry each week – between work and family there just don’t seem to be enough hours in the day – and I’m consistently in awe of some of the amazing entries that some people create. I fully intend to create my own vizzes for work that ‘borrow’ from a number of the ideas…

For week 16, I actually got around to playing with the data – a 784 MILLION row dataset on UK prescriptions. I knew I couldn’t even bend my head around that much data in any sensible way without spending a week playing with it – so I decided to focus on something small, and filtered the data down to one item, the Ventolin Evohaler.

I wanted to explore where in the UK this is prescribed, and whether it is increasing or decreasing. I discovered that it was decreasing… but because I ran out of time, I didn’t even think about checking the generic version to see whether that was increasing. If I had my time again this would be the first thing I would explore.

Of course I also dug into my old local surgery to see where this compared to others!

If I had more time I would go back and have another crack at this… maybe I will at some point.  But here it is, for better or worse, on Tableau Public. Let me know if you take a look at it!