First an apology. Many of the features of census mode are complicated and not user-friendly. I made this as a tool for me to analyse data and for me to set up interactive visualisations to show other people, with the possibility of changing a few settings. Actually setting up a different vis yourself is harder, but for anyone wondering how to do it, here we go. If you haven’t already, read the : 50 example page to see some of the things you can do. We’ll look at the different controls on the Controls column on the right.
Where it says “Data:”, click there to choose a different data set. You can click the ‘+’ on the right to use an additional data set. Most of the data is ABS census data, and most of them are numbers of people or households/dwellings broken down by any number of the many variables the ABS defines. We are not loading directly from ABS; any table in there is one I’ve downloaded from ABS TableBuilder and imported into the Mappage database.
Underneath any data sets, the next row(s) will describe the iterating variable, saying “Each (bar, sector, map region, row etc) is a ” and which variable is iterating. Many variables have multiple levels. For a map, the variable must be a geographical one (eg Residence or Place). Stacked bar/column charts and tables have two levels of iteration.
Underneath the iteration rows are selector rows, one for each variable. In each of these you can see the different values those variables can take. There will usually be one or more columns of boxes to let you choose. If there’s only one, it’s probably a filter, so all the numbers you see relate to that category. If there are two columns, the first one might be a filter and the second a divider; ie a second filter that returns a smaller number that is divided by the first to get a percentage. Unfortunately you can’t tell by looking at the columns what their use is.
Under all these rows are a number of other links. Firstly, some options to change the vis type – but some of these might not be as good as what you had before. Depending on the vis type and combinations of variables, there might be a few other tools including sorting options.
In writing this I realise a tutorial would be more helpful here. I might write one later, perhaps also a helper/wizard.
Your best best is usually to load one of the examples, then change the data set to what you want, then change the other settings. At the top are Undo/Redo buttons and a button that creates a shareable link (it will save in the clipboard if it can; if you lose it, press F12 and find it in the console).
For the ultimate control, click Code to see the code that ultimately loads data from the DB, defines selector columns, performs calculations and generates the vis. All those controls looked at before don’t produce the vis, they produce this code. I often edit this further to achieve things beyond what the controls allow, including arbitrary JavaScript. I won’t even start to document the language used here, but click “Run” to show the output again.
Don’t be afraid of breaking it, but don’t try to break it. If it seems broken, refresh the browser and try again.