I had a few follow on requests from yesterday’s post…  The 1st was for a map of Alaska.  I feel a little guilty for not including it in the first place, but it is difficult to make an aesthetic  map that includes the contiguous states and Alaska and Hawaii (I would be remiss at this point if I didn’t include that too.)  I made them both pretty high resolution, so I changed the scale so 1 dot equals 50 people instead of 500 for the national map.

Also, people were interested in smaller cities, so I created a list of all Metro CBSAs in Excel: MetroCBSA_FoodDesert.xlsx  In particular, Anchorage isn’t looking too good at 23% of people in a food desert.

One of the beautiful things about Alteryx is that these kinds of things are really easy to re-run.  Every process is immediately repeatable, there is almost never anything that needs steps to be done by hand.  In order to create these maps and the xlsx file, I simply needed to change a few constants in a Filter tool and in my Dot Density Map macro and hit run.  In just a little bit I had re-run the process looking at 15GB of data and presented a new result.

Thanks for reading,

ned.