Overview
For the Top Book Values Industries challenge, you will assume the role of an analyst for a venture capital fund. Your manager is looking to invest in industries with high book value firms and has asked you to analyze industry data to identify the best candidates. She will be using the results of your analysis in a presentation tomorrow morning and asks that you compile a report using Tableau.
Make sure you take time to understand the format of the data before you attempt to create the chart. Read the instructions carefully and you’ll be next in line for a promotion in no time!
Instructions
Download the data.
Using a bar graph, show the sum of all the book values from the firms in an industry, grouped by industry.
Sort your chart to show the highest book value industries at the top.
Make sure there is a label on each bar showing the sum of book values.
Add a color gradient to make the chart easy to understand in the presentation.
I think this is a great training as an intro to Tableau. It has a great balance of different abilities, including creating an essential visualization, adjusting the way the data is aggregated, adding labels, and using color scales. All in all, a great challenge that won’t take up a lot of time–thanks @Donovon!
The results of the analysis are super interesting as well! I looked at the total book value of each industry like was included in the instructions, and then I also looked at average Book Values by industry. Just a little something I found fascinating–the extremely negative book equity of “Special Retail”, which seems to be made up of auto parts retailers. I did a little quick digging, but its hard to tell from the data in this set if the negative book equity comes from negative retained earnings or share buybacks! It would be interesting to see where that comes from
I think this challenge would be great for someone new to Tableau! Changing the color, order, and labels are great tools within the software. I also tried clicking on different types of charts to visualize the data and “packed bubbles” also seems like a good option. I’m able to see all the data on one screen that way (though that may be because my screen is too small haha)
To make things look a bit cleaner, I filtered out any industries with a book value of less than 0. This eliminated the white space between most of the industry names and the bars!
I am curious to know how to interpret this Book Value number… Why are the numbers so low? For example, Apple’s book value is 4.40 when its Market Cap is 2.85T and price-to-book ratio is 39.69 (imputing a 71.84B book value). Please help me understand this.
Such a great challenge and a nice way to use my tableau skills! I am a little surprised that internet content and information are at the top for book value. I would have thought the value of those companies came from unquantifiable assets like goodwill and brand image. But it seems that they have a very high book value.
