Tableau Essentials: Formatting Tips – Labels
Today, we’re going to cover labels and some of the tricks and tips you can use with your visualization. To start, let’s take a simple horizontal bar chart. Our bar chart shows the penetration of Internet usage of countries with 200 million people or more. Now, let’s click on the Show Mark Labels button in […]
10 Tips to Create a Strong Password Policy
One of the most important aspects of security and data governance is establishing and enforcing a strong password policy. In 2012, LinkedIn had 6.5 million passwords cracked and eHarmony lost another 1.5 million. If 2014 has taught us anything, it’s that hackers and the threat of cyber theft is growing. Sony Pictures was forced to cancel […]
IIS Not Starting with Error 7001: ‘The Data Is Invalid’
We received notice on a server that the World Wide Web Publishing Service had stopped. This happened to be an Exchange 2010 server, so all webmail functionality stopped. I attempted to start the service manually but received an error that a dependency was unable to start. Reviewing the event logs, I saw that the dependency […]
Tableau Essentials: Formatting Tips – Custom Shapes
Today, we’ll look at some formatting ideas that you can use on your next visualization. Specifically, we’ll look at using custom shapes to serve as our marks. Here is a simple table illustrating where players from the 2014 World Cup play their club football: Club Location field on the Columns shelf Players field (with aggregation […]
Tableau Essentials: Formatting Tips – Introduction
Now that we have some basics out of the way and a few chart types in our arsenal, it’s time to move onto some of the finer points of data visualization in Tableau. First, let’s talk about formatting. Most of us know the saying, “don’t judge a book by its cover,” but that couldn’t be […]
10 Questions for Tableau Zen Master Ramon Martinez
I met Ramon Martinez via Twitter before I met him in person. Ramon is a fellow Tableau Zen Master and works as a specialist in health metrics at the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO/WHO). The first dashboard of Ramon’s that I recall seeing was this one. What I saw in his dashboard was a careful […]
Every Day Is Leg Day: Visualizing Cycling Data in Tableau
Early last year, I got some bad news after a routine doctor visit. The specifics are unimportant, but the gist is that I needed to make some significant changes in my life while I was still young enough to do so. I’ve always been a big guy, and you might have known that if we’ve […]
10 Questions for DBA Superstar Josh Varner
A couple years ago, Josh Varner was a consultant working on our BI team at InterWorks. The last time I saw Josh (when he was still on our team) was at the Vertica Conference in Boston. I was leaving early for a gig in New Jersey. I stopped by to say goodbye to the team. […]
2015 CFP Championship: Calculating Recruiting Distances in Tableau
A couple weeks ago, I came across a College Football Playoff blog post that mapped the distance of each team’s campus to each player’s hometown. While detailed and visually appealing, you could not interact with the map – making it impossible to do more detailed analysis. This inspired me to create a Tableau dashboard that […]
Data Art: A Portrait of Wind in the US
Of the hundreds of data visualizations I’ve seen, only a few stand out as exceptionally striking. The design, subject and uniqueness all come together perfectly. One of them is the animated Wind Map at Hint.fm. I can practically feel the air moving along the smooth, sweeping lines. It inspired me to try mimicking it in […]