Last night was the Dallas – Fort Worth Tableau user group’s annual holiday party.  They say there aint no party like a data geek party, I think the 15 data geeks in attendance last night would agree!

One of my favorite traditions is the year end retrospective blog post.  This has been a fun year for the DFW.TUG.  We had a lot of great content this year.  The highlights for me were the sessions that members of our group presented.   Sonia Raval did a great talk on data blending and Matt Krzysiak shared a talk on how his workflow has changed since adopting Tableau.  Matt did a version of this talk during out very first session; it was a real pleasure to see it again and to see how his workflow has changed in the last year.

This has been a great year for our group, next year promises even more fun.  We’re planning some sort of event (either a group night or maybe a half day training session) in Dallas, another in Fort Worth and regular group nights in Las Colinas.  This year we’re hoping to do at least one virtual session (Andy Cotgreave will share his Tool Tip magic with us).  There has been some talk of a Dallas Iron Viz challenge where we bring together masters of different analytics tools (like Reporting Services, Qlikview, Tableau) to face off in a data viz showdown.  It will be an epic battle, in the end there can be only one!  (Come on!  I’m allowed at least one gratuitous sci-fi reference per post! – tc) 

If you live in the DFW area or find yourself visiting during the third week of any month email me at Tim.Costello@Interworks.com and I’ll help you connect with the group.  We’ll be the ones getting geeky with our data!