Tableau Padawan - Data Types vs. Display Formats
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An introduction to the difference between data types and display formats and how they have can create unexpected outcomes in Excel data brought into Tableau.
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Rose Curves in Tableau
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I love when people get creative and come up with visuals like these, if you want to see more, check out Shirley Wu’s project with Nadieh Bremer at datasketch.es for starters. Techniques like these (or using things like the rose curve) to encode data will definitely require a more engaged user base. Readers will need to take some time to understand what each rose petal/shape is and then it will take them time to compare the petals across the visual. This type of technique is probably not the best choice to visualize your data when granular differences between your marks need to be analyzed by your reader.
Read MoreX, Y and a bit of Z - Cheater 3D Orthographic Views & Making everything "Spatial"
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Anya must have pinged me 10 times over the course of the last week asking me questions about rendering 3d cars in Tableau. I figured it must have something to do with curing malaria. My reply was a bit ironic given the fact that I’ve done my own 3d car. I did it for fun though… I don’t like being told I can’t do stuff. it just doesn’t work as part of a production workbook. Well… from a performance standpoint maybe we will get there soon. But for now my suggestion was to pick a good angle and then drive a steamroller over it and just make it into polygons. I really should have seen the next question coming, but she asked how to do that. I was stumped. My best idea was, hire a graphic artist to trace it for you…
Last night she told me she solved it using QGIS… mind explosion! Of course! Why not use mapping software for this? Geography isn’t the only thing spatial. Why shouldn’t you use QGIS to map your car, your plane, the shelves of your supermarket, what have you. I always thought background images were misplaced in Tableau, I wonder if this is what they were thinking when they put it under maps. Latitude and Longitude are just a special name for x and y (or is it the other way around?). Why not hijack Tableau’s mapping capabilities and import your polygons as custom shapes?
I’ve gone to great lengths to hack multiple layers onto maps, so I was excited to hear multi-layered maps will be coming to Tableau, but this opens the door to hacking that feature into all sorts of things. Someone once told me that everything in Tableau is a scatterplot but I’m starting to think maybe everything should be a map. Oh… I am going to crash that Beta so hard!
Read MoreOn the topic of community: & being friends and mentors.
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First - sign up and sign up for Emily Kunde's Mentor Match program, and have a chance to win an hour of help with either Allan or Anya as well as other prizes to be announced on Emily's site soon.
This friendship started with a Tweet: March 5th, 2014 Tweet to @AllanWalkerIT help…..! ? "Since you are the king of Tableau Maps, I wanted to see if you had any suggestions?" For over two years now, we have worked together on many collaborations. We hope with a quick review of how we have expanded our skills by working together, you can learn from our take-aways and find friends and mentors to work with.
Read More#GTDG - Look ma, no TDE!
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(Or, how to build dashboards from Google Spreadsheets – without using the Tableau data connector)
#Codex Ligat - "Code Binds Us"
Read MoreTableau Padawan - Getting the Most Out of Tableau Conference 2016 #TC16
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The 2016 Tableau Conference is a month away, here’s a list of tips for first-timers (and reminders for those who've forgotten). Thanks to @prashud for asking!
Read MoreTableau Padawan: Faster Nested Sorts
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Tableau's sorting behavior is somewhere between "a little weird" and "WTF?!?" for those of used to the nested sorting behavior we can get in Excel and other tools. This is one case where Tableau's "mental model" of sorting doesn't match the mental model of many users, if you'd like Tableau to change this you can vote for the Independent Sorting feature request. Explaining why Tableau sorts the way it does would take a much longer post, for now, I'm going to skip the "why" for the "how" and the "what" and jump into my preferred & faster way to do nested sorting using an ad-hoc calculation.
Read MoreTableau Padawan - When the Pill You See is Not the Pill You Use
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Today’s lesson is about understanding Tableau as a data driven drawing engine: change the data and we’ll change what Tableau draws. In this case we’re going to change the data to change the color. Recently I received a question where someone had created a heatmap with a diverging color palette like this (demo built using Tableau’s CoffeeChain sample data).
Read MoreConcatenating Rows into String Lists in Tableau for #VisualizeNoMalaria
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As part of the Tableau Foundation/PATH/Zambia Ministry of Health #VisualizeNoMalaria project to eliminate malaria in Zambia by 2020 we had a request to build a “report” to show when health facilities have not submitted malaria incidence data so that administrators and staff can be notified in an easy-to-ready way. element (such as all the product categories a customer has purchased), etc. Read on for how to do this yourself and learn a bit more about the different levels of detail of data that we work with in Tableau.
Read MorePadawan Dojo: SUMIF() in Tableau
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Here at DataBlick we're known for doing amazing things with Tableau and teaching others. Our Padawan Dojo series is for new users (and users who help others) to learn how to do your own great things in Tableau. This lesson is about: learning an important mental model for working with Tableau, understanding when and how to do the equivalent of an Excel SUMIF() in Tableau, and finally how to validate the results.
Read MoreHive Plot Part Deux in Tableau by Chris DeMartini
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Note: This is an incremental post to the circular and hive plot network graphing post. When looking back at my network graphing post recently I remembered one piece of the Hive Plot that I wanted to crack and didn't get to in that original effort. One design element that helps distinguish the Hive Plot is the concept of splitting an interconnected axis into two to help visualize this aspect of a network. I think this helps to view the interconnectivity of an axis within the network you are visualizing. Also, with tools like Tableau, we could even allow for an expand/collapse feature on this axis.
Read MoreDynamic Small Multiples in Tableau by Chris DeMartini
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There have been a number of small multiple designs (see the list at the bottom of this post) in the past year or so and I am always a big fan of them, I figured why not take a chance at building one myself. If you have read any of my previous blogs, you may have noticed that I like the word “dynamic”, so I tried to figure out a way to incorporate a dynamic aspect into this visualization based on player data from the last six NBA seasons.
Dynamic?
One of the tricks with small multiple design is the fact that you have to lay out the graphs in a trellis panel (aka a grid). This can be accomplished by hard coding and sorting the partitioning dimension of your analysis, however, I challenged myself to calculate the location for each graph within Tableau on the fly. The reason why I wanted to do this was to be able to update, change between seasons, etc. without having to do any additional work on the trellis layout of the small multiple viz.
Alteryx Newbie Creates Dynamic Parameters in Tableau First Day by Jonathan Drummey
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I wanted to take Alteryx out for a drive to see what it could do and decided to look into the Tableau XML, in particular using Alteryx to dynamically update Tableau parameters. This is something I've worked on before (see Creating a Dynamic Parameter with a Tableau Data Blend) and last year at the Tableau Conference Bryan Brandow & Andy Kriebel demoed a solution that they'd built for Facebook with the same basic idea as my Alteryx one. The particular use case is one of the most requested ones for dynamic parameters, namely updating the parameter list as the data changes.
Read MoreDIY Chord Diagrams in Tableau - by Noah Salvaterra
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Noah has been called "ridiculous", for his ability to make just about anything happen in Tableau, as readers of Jonathan Drummey's Drawing with Numbers have already seen. This post is no exception. I knew this was cooking, and my jaw still dropped.
Read MoreTime to Get Hopping with Jump Plot by Chris DeMartini and Tom VanBuskirk
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In preparation for the upcoming Think Data Thursday, "I didn't know that was Tablossible", this post introduces a novel graph type referred to as the “Jump Plot”. Jump Plot is the brainchild of Tom VanBuskirk and was first implemented by Chris DeMartini using Tableau. This post is a combined effort from Tom and Chris. There are pieces of this post describing the benefits that Jump Plot provides, however additional details regarding the graph type and all it can offer can be found atjumpplot.com. In short, the Jump Plot provides a new way to visualize event data, with a focus on sequence distributions and bottlenecks.
Read MoreTableau JS API 102
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Padawan Challenge: Build a Website with 4 fully responsive Tableau Dashboard views and add an Open Parameter that affects all of them.
Hello Dojo’ers! Ready to have some more fun with Allan, Chris, and Anya? Get out your favorite text editor, a bag of Skittles (for little rewards here and there) and lets get to it.
Last year at the Tableau conference, DataBlick presented a lot of artsy fartsy bits on how the whole Tableau Dashboard should be a canvas. Data, pixels, design elements, formatting and math should be used to paint the composition of the viz as a whole on the Tableau canvas. In this lesson, we are zooming one step out, and now a Tableau viz becomes a bit of paint on an html canvas.
Read MoreNavigating your Family History in Tableau by Chris DeMartini
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We are going to build two tree views in Tableau, an ancestor view and a descendant view of a dynamically selected root person. Within this post I will walk through building the ancestor tree (a binary tree), feel free to reach out if you want more information on how the descendant tree was built, but will leave that to the imagination for now.
First things first, the credits. I started this effort with two main inputs, (1) the node tree link diagram that was explained and created by Jeffery Shaffer and (2) thedynamic parameter posts that Nelson Davis recently went through. I rely on both of these to get to the family tree viz shown here. In addition to these, I also askedAllan Walker, Noah Salvaterra and Anya A’Hearn for general help and guidance along the way.
Read MoreTableau JS API 101
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In this post we start with the very, VERY, basics of setting up a simple webpage, embedding a Tableau viz in it, and then adding elements to your webpage that will interact with the Tableau viz. If you already are familiar with the JS API, check back in a few dojo lessons and we will move onto interacting with other web applications to do things like enable voice and gesture control, add sound or haptic feedback, or even apply it to an actual business use case :-p. If you don’t even really know what html is, this is the place for you to get started on the path to JS API awesome.
Read MoreComb the Hairball with BioFabric in Tableau by Chris DeMartini
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Recently I posted about creating circular and hive plot network diagrams using Tableau and a question was posted around whether we could also execute theBioFabric network graph within Tableau. There is a lot of additional information about the BioFabric network graph at their website. The super-quick demo is a good intro to the graph if you have not seen it before.
The answer to the question posted is yes and this post is designed to walk you through the steps needed to build your own BioFabric graph within Tableau.
Read MoreBuilding a Visualization of Transit System Data Using GTFS
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The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) defines a common format for public transportation schedules and associated geographic information. GTFS "feeds" allow public transit agencies to publish their transit data and developers to write applications that consume that data in an interoperable way. This post shows you how to use this data to create interactive transit maps in Tableau.
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