Visualizing Proportions - Data Points: Visualization That Means Something - page 171

FIGurE 5-31 JobVoyager application
Change the _url to point at the spending data available at http://datasets
.flowingdata.com/expenditures.txt . Like jobs.txt , the data is also a tab-
delimited file. The first column is year, the second category, and the last
column is expenditure.
private var _url:String =
“http://datasets.flowingdata.com/expenditures.txt”;
Now the file will read in your spending data instead of the data for jobs.
easy stuff so far.
The next two lines, line 58 and 59, are the column names, or in this case,
the distinct years that job data was available. It's by decade from 1850 to
2000. You could make things more robust by finding the years in the loaded
data, but because the data isn't changing, you can save some time and
explicitly specify the years.