When I think of fusion I think of cuisine, like Asian Fusion or music…not being a foodie I really think of music first. I love most music in what is considered the World Music category and B-Tribe is one of my favorites.
The film and soundtrack 1 Giant Leap is another that comes to mind…
Sadly, I don’t get to spend a relaxing day listening to great music, I get to play with a new tool instead, Google Fusion Tables (I can still listen to music in the background too).
I decided to use the Excel file I have of all Florida Licensed Massage Therapists (LMTs) as of January 2016. This is a collection of 30,000+ rows of information regarding current Florida LMTs. I am interested in the distribution of this population compared to the distribution of those with email addresses on file in preparation for a survey project I am developing. Will just using the email addresses on file be a good representation of the distribution in general. I learned it is important to give Fusion a location hint, in this case I just used ‘Florida, USA’ which speeds up the process tremendously. I would have thought that choosing the ‘county description’ column would have given a good picture of the distribution but it did not, so I chose ‘city’ instead. What is different about this visualization is that we can create a link to the map and to the data.
After a break and a deeper look at the documentation for Google Fusion, I realized that the map didn’t look filled out because, it will only geocode a limited number of rows at one time. So I returned to the file I had begun yesterday and got an entirely different picture and this makes much more sense. The list of Florida LMTs includes many that reside out of state and that is now more clear. It is not uncommon for Florida LMTs to maintain licensing after moving elsewhere and often LMTs are seasonal, as are many of our clients.
More detailed picture of Florida LMTs.
This looks more like the 30,000+ Florida LMTs and I will have to come back tomorrow to see if there are still more.
I still want to look at the total numbers of LMTs with email addresses on file and see how those are distributed compared to the distribution of LMTs around the state, I must somehow get a count of those with email addresses per city. Perhaps I need to go back to Excel or Sheets and do a pivot table.
I performed a Summarize action in Fusion using email addresses and the sum of ‘county description,’ which gave this List. Unfortunately, I am not sure it is useful, if the numbers represent the count of LMTs in individual counties then that could work. So I will just return to excel and look at the pivot tables for emails by county and county by county.
The numbers of records with email addresses closely matches the total numbers by county, so it is possible that using email addresses would be an accurate representation of the population of Florida LMTs.
I have some more exploring to do to understand the uses of Google Fusion. The merging of different tables is ultimately interesting and useful but I am not sure how I would use it now.