Learning Technology on the EDGE
The consequence of a dynamic environment is the need to know it all, or at least the perceived need to know more than anyone else. That is what makes one consultant shine over all the others – a perception that our knowledge is greater than that of our competition. Most often the reality is that our […]
Portals for Tableau 101: Data Manager
If you haven’t used the Data Manager in Portals for Tableau before, you may not have a good grasp of what it does. In a nutshell, it is a simple form builder. You can think of its groups as forms, attributes as fields and items as records. Data can be collected by the Data Manager […]
Tableau Extensions: Natural Language Generation with Wordsmith by Automated Insights
Tableau 2018.2 brought us a few new features, including the Services Manager, spatial data join and Dashboard Extensions. All of these features are neat and handy for their relative use cases, but today we’re going to focus on Extensions. Dashboard Extensions allow you to add some third-party functionality directly into your dashboard. There’s already a […]
Visualizing Canada’s ‘Species at Risk Public Registry’ in Tableau
The good people over at the Species at Risk Public Registry, sararegistry.gc.ca, which is part of the Government of Canada, provide website visitors with a list of species monitored by the Ministry for the Environment and Climate Change for any changes in the sizes of their populations. The Registry contains lots of great information on […]
My Thoughts on the 2018 Quantrix Dimension Conference
Four years ago, I wrote a blog post speculating about future business intelligence workflow and tools for business information systems that would provide the capabilities of high-priced legacy enterprise business information systems but at a fraction of the cost. Part of that post included a unique spreadsheet called Quantrix Modeler. Shortly after that post went […]
A Use Case for Tableau Prep: Using a ‘Master Table’ to See All Records
Here’s the scenario: I work at Global Superstore. We sell products from lots of different sub-categories. I can always reference this from our Master Inventory File: I get weekly sales data sent to me, and my job is to make a weekly report for each region that gives them their sales. This month, I load […]
Remixing Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital in the 21st Century’ with Tableau
A couple of summers ago, I read a short 577-page book on the dynamics of wealth and income inequality by the French economist Thomas Piketty. This book had kind of become a huge deal in the field of economics. One reason was its huge scope. We are talking economic research that encompassed decades and decades […]
Creating a Scorecard in Portals for Tableau
Scorecards are used to observe KPI’s over time, are incredibly valuable for real-time business insights and are available for use in Portals for Tableau! This post will go into how to create the example below: Before you begin, make sure you have Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server and Portals for Tableau. If you don’t have […]
Viz for Social Good: United Nations Development Program
Yet another great project came out this month from the folks at Viz for Social Good. This time around, we’re exploring data from the United Nations Development Programme to help build a crisis risk dashboard to assess risk and crises in the Sahel region of Africa. The project consists of two data sets: one listing incidents […]
A Quick Exasol Script for Building Python UDFs
A client recently had a challenge wanting to use Exasol’s User-Defined Functions with a Python script, but they were having a hard time coming up with the right syntax to get it working properly. There’s a good deal of documentation out there, though much of it seemed a bit convoluted or difficult to comprehend. I’m […]