Outlier Data Bites

2023-09-17

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How to make custom maps — even if you don’t know how to code

When programs such as Flourish or Datawrapper don’t have the map format you need, you can make your own custom map. Here’s how.

2023-09-10

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Building projects with Leaflet and SvelteKit

If you’re planning on building projects in SvelteKit, it needs a slightly different set-up to Leaflet.js. Here’s what you need to do to get it to work.

2023-09-07

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5 reasons to switch to OpenRefine to clean data

It has a pretty steep learning curve but it’s definitely worth the effort to learn OpenRefine if you need to clean large amounts of very messy data.

2023-09-05

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How we create custom charts using Flourish and Figma

At The Outlier we publish a lot of static graphics and we like to apply our own styles. Here’s how we do it using Flourish and Figma.

2023-09-03

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Simple guide to scraping data from PDFs

Papers, PDFs and poorly scanned documents are the way most data journalism projects begin. But instead of typing up a new spreadsheet, here’s how to use Adobe Acrobat DC to do all the hard work for you.

2023-08-30

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10 spreadsheet formulas we use to superpower our data analysis

Both Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets are powerful spreadsheet programmes for storing and sorting through mounds of data. Here are our favourite formulas for making sense of data.

2023-08-03

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Working with Open Street Map vector data in QGIS

When we teach data journalism most people are eager to make a map but they’re usually unsure of where to get data for a map. And while there are many good sources for map data, if you’re looking for something, like a particular town or neighbourhood, that’s not always so easy. One solution is to use QGIS and Open Street Map to create your own map data.

2023-07-06

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How to extract multiple features from a shapefile in QGIS

This guide will help you find and extract features from a larger map into a smaller one. In this example, selected rivers in South Africa are copied into a new GeoJSON format file.

2023-04-15

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10 steps to create a custom Svelte component library

Although creating complex sites with multiple components in SvelteKit is pretty simple already, creating a library for your most regularly used components adds even more power to your projects.

2023-04-08

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Loading non-essential data behind the scenes in Svelte

Streaming promises makes it simple to fetch data without having the page wait for non-essential data requests to complete before starting to render.