Pumped up: A look at how the price of gas has risen

You probably don’t need a fancy Domo chart to tell you that gas has gotten quite expensive. But we went ahead and imported weekly average gas prices from the U.S. Energy Information Agency anyway. In doing so, we also get to explore one of my favorite new features in Domo: Smart Text, which lets you insert dynamic text within both notebook cards and in the title for any card in Domo. So, when you select something other than “United States” from the drop-down menu under “Geo Name” (below), it will also change the chart next to it (“United States-Average Weekly Gas Prices”) to whatever region, state, or city you chose.

Similarly, the time period will change from “Last 30 Years” when I select a different date range, or highlight a particular section in the line graph. “The Min Gas Price” and “Max Gas Price” text use Domo dynamic summary numbers, which allow me to add metrics to my narrative. These are great tools for ensuring that users have the proper context even as they self-serve with different filters and drills.

You will also notice here that we are experimenting with a narrative feature (still in pre-beta), which dynamically generates insights about a specified card in Domo. I really like this feature because it helps bring new insights out of data in a narrative format. As you filter for a new geography or a different time period, the narrative refreshes with new insights. Pretty darn cool, if you ask me.

Since we launched “Domo on Data,” we have been quite focused on U.S. data. That’s much to the chagrin of some of my colleagues around the world, but it simply has to do with the challenge in getting metrics from other governments, which tend to be good at offering free data but bad at compiling across countries. That said, for this post, we were able to find some information on global gas prices via the Global Petrol Prices site. The data is not available for free, but does give us some great context. For instance, while gas in the U.S. is more than $4 per gallon, it’s almost $11 in Hong Kong and only slightly less than that in the Netherlands. Yikes.

We will work to bring more global data to these pages in coming posts. Oh, and if you’re wondering when the last time gas was under $1 per gallon in the U.S., the answer is March 1999. How I long for those days!