Dan Murray’s Tableau Best Practices Top 10 List
1. Avoid the use of quick filters on dashboards to improve load times. Use cross tabs, heat maps and highlight table filters...
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2011 wrap up.
It’s been a remarkable year for me; without a doubt the best year of my career (ever). I was fortunate enough to be invited to give presentations on Tableau and SQL Server in Canada, Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Louisiana and Michigan. I delivered 16 presentations this...
Non-Traditional Data Sources in Tableau
Tableau gives us a lot of ways to connect to data. We can easily connect to Excel, Access, SQL Server, Oracle … the list goes on and on. One place that’s not in that list is email. We get a lot of data that’s been...
Quick Connect to Excel Spreadsheet from Tableau
There are a couple ways we can connect to data in Excel … today I want to show you one that many people overlook. You can simply drag an icon for a file that Tableau recognizes (Microsoft Access, Microsoft Excel or a Text File like...
DFW.TUG Year End Retrospective
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...
Enhanced 2011 Final Harris Poll Results Tableau Style
As the last week of the college regular season football schedule ended, the big debate was if Oklahoma State did enough to earn a spot in the BCS Championship game. As an Oklahoma state fan, I believe they did, after they demolished a pre-season...
Improved Waterfall Chart in Tableau
A waterfall chart is visualization that helps illustrate the cumulative effect of multiple data elements. The waterfall chart isn’t my favorite visual, but I've softened to it lately. It's hard to not like a chart that is sometimes called the Mario chart due to the suspension of...
Dashboard Failure
Nobody blogs about failure, right? In meetings and during training sessions I often talk about both failure and success. Specifically, I often mention my definition of dashboard failure which is if the user asks: "Can I download this data into Excel?" This will, of course, happen but your...
Three Points to Remember for Success With Tableau and OLAP Cubes
From time to time, clients create proof-of-concept dashboards in Excel or other relational data source and then hit a wall converting it to an OLAP cube. I’m never surprised to see it happen. What most people don’t realize is that Tableau behaves much differently when...
Custom Table Calculations Part 2
This is the second post on Table Calculations in Tableau. The first post covered the Groundwork, pill types, a worksheet layout, and the basics of the TOTAL() function. This post will look at what I consider the functions: INDEX(), FIRST(), LAST(), and SIZE(), partitioning vs....
Groundwork for Custom Table Calculations
Custom Table Calculations is one of the most advanced concepts in Tableau. The main resources Tableau provides can be found at On-Demand Training - Table Calculations (requires sign in) and Top 10 Tableau Table Calculations where you can find a variety of examples and a white paper with additional details....
Will Google’s New BigQuery Make an “Analytics-Style” Dent in the BI Market?
As a general Google fan, BigQuery looks like it could be an interesting project to monitor for the data crunching and BI geeks among us. The project could flop entirely due to lack of marketing or a partnership foundation -- or they could really do it...
City of London Spending – Jan 2011 to September 2011
It's always interesting to see where government is spending so here's some data on a platter...
Nato Operations in Libya – The Guardian
I'm not a great fan of infographics, they don't assist the viewer in understanding the core story being told, so here's my alternative version of a Guardian produced infographic. See below for the original: Although pretty and colourful does it make it easy to understand the...
Extreme Viz Makeover: CDC’s Alcohol Use Among Women
In August, the CDC published some data and charts related to Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD). Included was the following map breaking down alcohol use and binge drinking by state: View Dashboard The chart contains all the relevant information, but is less helpful than the typical...
Works Management Article, “Clever Business,” Mentions Dan Murray of InterWorks
Works Management (WM), the voice of UK manufacturing, provides a forum for the process management and improvement industry to exchange views on business improvement. WM interviews the industry’s leading strategic thinkers behind manufacturing in the UK and brings to light how business intelligence and process...
Croydon Cyclone 2011
This weekend saw the Croydon Cyclone disc golf tournament. It was the biggest UK tour event for a long time, and the Croydon club created a tough course. Here's the analysis of each hole's results. As you can see, it was a tough event. Click...
Panel Charts in Tableau
Over on the forum, Jeremy asked about making trellis charts. For more info on trellis/panel charts, John Peltier has a great article about them. Consider a case where you want to visualise two measures (eg sales and time) for a Dimension with many members, such...
Failed Tableau Server Install: Three Possible Solutions
99.9% of the time, Tableau Server installation will be smooth sailing. The wizard is simple and easy, and Tableau’s online help is a wonderful guide. However, if you do have the misfortune of seeing the error message “Tableau Server initialization failed. See...
Critiquing Other People’s Tableau Cisualisations
Tableau's sample files wouldn't look so good if they weren't well designed Alistair Knock posted a great question by Moose Peterson on Google+ about feedback on user photographs on the web:why do most people just make anodyne comments along the lines of “Nice!” when they probably...