Cook County Budget Visualization Guide

Cook County utilizes Socrata's Budget tool to display our data in an interactive format. Many of the visualizations offer the ability to filter, drill down and sort to provide detailed insight. Below are examples from our Cook County Open Budget page. This article will explain how to use the charts and tools provided. Visualizations are available within each of the three budget categories available on the site:  Revenues, Expenditures, and Capital.  When viewing one of these budget categories, you can navigate to the right panel on the page, where you can view the data by a Snapshot, Pie Chart and Over Time. For each selected visualization you are able to filter on the year you’d like to explore and further drill down based on additional categories.

The Snapshot visualization provides a bar chart that displays both the adopted and recommended budget allocation for the year selected. The recommended amount is the darker colored bar nested within the adopted amount which is the lighter bar. Selecting a bar will allow you to further drill down into the selected item for finer details regarding that budget category.

Similar to the Snapshot visualization, the Pie Chart visualization is also interactive. However, it is only capable of showing either the Recommended budget or the Adopted budget, not both at the same time. In this example, we are only shown the Adopted Budget. However, you are able to explore other budget breakouts such as the Recommended Budget by using the drop-down list on the right. 

The Over Time visualization provides a chart that reflects a line chart displaying the budget over time. Initially the chart defaults by showing you the overall total. Directly above the chart you are able to alter the view by single year or all the years. Selecting the budget categories in the middle right panel will allow you to compare the various categories against the overall total. You are also able to toggle off/on the "Total" category if you want to view each budget category.