Tableau Essentials: Chart Types – Introduction
Not everyone is a Tableau guru, at least not yet. To help Tableau rookies, we’re starting from square one with the Tableau Essentials blog series. The series is intended to be an easy-to-read reference on the basics of using Tableau Software, particularly Tableau Desktop 8.1 and 8.2. Since there are so many cool features to […]
Custom SQL in Tableau 8.2
The improvements of the Visual Data Window in Tableau 8.2 gave a breath of fresh air to the Tableau community. So far, the new design has been intuitive and user friendly. However, when I went searching for the Custom SQL option when connecting to an Excel file in 8.2, I was stumped. I searched frantically […]
Patent Assertion Entities: You’ve Been Tableau’d
Let it be duly noted that I used the euphemistic term rather than the pejorative “patent troll”. +1 for me! What is Patent Trolling? When an issue makes to the Office of the President of the United States, you know it’s gotten big. Patent trolling, or using patents to extort money from people and companies, has […]
2014 BYU College Football Preview Visualized in Tableau
If you’re a sports fan like me, the next month can be one of the longest of the year. The World Cup and NBA Finals are over, the British Open just ended, and the baseball playoffs have not yet started. Thus, we are left with a long month of waiting for the college football season […]
Website Data Collection Made Easy Using XPath in import.io
The release of import.io saves headache and heartache for many data lovers. Using a simple interface and a little bit of magic, manual input of data from websites is shortened to just a few minutes. I can say from experience how pleasant and easy the interface is to use, even for beginners. With all great data […]
2014 OSU College Football Preview Visualized in Tableau
If you’re a sports fan like me, the next month can be one of the longest of the year. The World Cup and NBA Finals are over, the British Open just ended, and the baseball playoffs have not yet started. Thus, we are left with a long month of waiting for the college football season […]
Identify a VID PID for a USB Device
One of the more common ways organizations choose to address security on computers is to restrict what USB devices can be utilized within an environment. Depending on the program, there are a number of ways in which devices can be identified and filtered. In most cases, third party programs can utilize the vendor identification and product […]
Cleaning Up WinSXS Folder on Windows Server 2008 R2
I finally found some good information for cleaning up the WinSXS folder on new instances of Windows. I found the following site extremely helpful: http://blogs.technet.com/b/askpfeplat/archive/2014/05/13/how-to-clean-up-the-winsxs-directory-and-free-up-disk-space-on-windows-server-2008-r2-with-new-update.aspx. Consequently, I was able to get 7GB of data cleaned up from the WinSXS folder on the first Server 2008R2 machine I followed this process on. Here are the basic steps: […]
Evolution 2014 Viewer Numbers Visualized in Tableau
Two of my passions in life are data visualization and fighting games. These two passions haven’t overlapped a whole lot, but lately I’m finding more and more uses for data in taking my Ultra Street Fighter 4 game to the next level. Last weekend, July 11-13, was the Evolution Championship Series, more commonly known as […]
Tableau Essentials – The Status Bar
Concluding the Tableau workspace in our Tableau Essentials series is the overlooked Status Bar. It runs along the bottom of the application, beneath the Data Window and the worksheet tabs. See it pictured below in Figure 1. Figure 1: The Status Bar. Summary Information The three pieces of information on the left-hand side of the […]