Art in Tableau 1
We love playing with Tableau and seeing what new things we can do with it. These visuals all look better on a full screen so please feel free to download the workbook. ...
Channel
Data
Simple Histograms in Tableau
Histograms are yet another example of an efficient statistical tool that Tableau can create for you with ease. Created by well-known Statistician Karl Pearson, a histogram also functions as an effective approximation to a variable’s probability distribution function. A histogram is a frequency plot: it will...
The Art of Living
I’ve been thinking a lot about life balance lately. If I love what I do for my ‘work’, why would I want to stop doing it to ‘play’? I’ve struggled with these questions for a long time. Chuck Hooper (blog:twitter) shared his thoughts on this...
Using Custom Shapes in Tableau
Tableau comes preloaded with a great set of shapes already available for the user to choose from. Shapes are useful in scatterplots and in bulletgraphs, among other visualizations, so having a variety to choose from is necessary to create as dynamic a visualization as possible....
.twb vs .twbx: What’s the difference?
Whenever you save your work in Tableau, the default file extension is .twb, or Tableau Workbook. However, you have the option to save your work under a different extension, .twbx. A .twbx file is a Tableau Packaged Workbook, meaning it is the original .twb file grouped...
SOPA Congressional Picture
House Resolution 3261, more commonly known as SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act, is garnering a great deal of attention lately, especially as major websites such as Wikipedia and Reddit are blacking out their services in protest of the controversial legislation. For proponents of SOPA,...
Data Connections – Making life easy for your fellow colleagues
In my experience most technical IT types love to name databases and data fields in weird and wonderful ways. A good example is this gem I encountered recently "ATV", take a guess at what that means. If you create a data field called "ATV" and...
Instruction for Tableau Dashboard Hidden in Tooltip
Are you creating a Tableau dashboard and need to leave instructions for users on how to use the dashboard, but you don't want to take up valuable space for these instructions? If so, this post is definitely for you. Using a Created Field, we will...
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...
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...
