Hey Tableau Analyst. What does the Data Say?

I like a lot of charts.  I have nothing against any particular chart and have probably used and abused all of them at one time or other.  I'm not a stickler for rules and I don't demand best practices of myself or my charts.

I try to find the best possible way to SEE the results. That's in the context of the dashboard as a whole and mostly, most importantly, the chart chosen depends on the data's distribution.

Before I begin to analyze and investigate the data, I can't tell you what chart(s) I'll settle on for the dashboard.  And halfway through building a dashboard, many charts will get discarded or radically changed [I don't draw my dashboards out first either].

The example below shows how sometimes the chart you think would be perfect, may not be the best chart possible.  Fortunately, you're a Tableau analyst.  You have the tool that allows you to explore your data FAST. You don't have to decide on a chart and then put your data in it. It's ok to not know which chart will be right at the beginning of the process - it's a discovery process.

Unbend Your Mind for Visual Analysis

Blank stares, then... Huh?

That's what I get when I say 'Visual analysis'.  People tend to think I'm talking about making a chart.  I am, but more than that, I'm talking about doing your data discovery visually with Tableau.

Chris Stolte gave a great talk on this a few years ago and I put it at the bottom of this blog as a Lunch n Learn.  I highly recommend you watch to see his brilliance in action.

Building Dashboards for the Smartphone

This post was originally shared on Tableau's blog.

I rarely get requests for Tableau dashboards on smartphones, probably because they are usually a secondary concern. That is, most business dashboards don’t automatically translate well to the phone format, so they are not high on the priority list. Here are a few things I’ve learned when making these wee dashboards that might be of help to you. 

Drill Down

Have you noticed how rarely you hear the term Data Mining these days? That's because a lot of people now know that it is a complex thing, and not just filtering a pivot table in Excel.

The funny thing is that 'Drill Down' is just the opposite. People ask for it - make a big deal of it - in dashboard building, not realizing that this is a simple thing in Tableau. There's a few ways to provide the 'Drill Down', but it's important to first ask what exactly do they mean by 'Drill Down'. Usually, it's one of three things:

10 Freebie Holiday Toys for Tableau Analysts

Happy Holidays!

Here's a few, very simple, free tools that will help make your
dashboarding work just a little easier.  Click on the images to
go to the respective sites for download.

Playing Nice with Tableau or How to Build a Dashboard That Your Co-Workers Can Maintain If You Get Hit By a Bus

We all like to think we're indispensable at work, but we're not. We're just not.

So get over yourself, Simon.

Have you ever built the most clever Excel dashboard/database/reporting system that you knew would keep you in the money for years?

You know you did, Simon. Yes, and it was forever referred to as the "Simon Chan Report". After the accolades, you settle in to maintain the damned thing, month after month, year after year. And it's taking up a lot of your time because it has become so complex (named ranges, linked fields, complex multi-layered formulas, vba) that any new request for change will take weeks to implement. It really has no business being an Excel report.

Bad Charts Delight

I know you love them. C'mon, admit it. Pies, donuts, bubbles,... anything stacked or layered. You love 'em. We all do. There's something about these bad chart choices that are appealing to us. If they didn't tickle our insides we wouldn't see so many of them on infographics and dashboards.

Yet we know (yes, we do) that these are bad choices for conveying information. Our job as dashboard builders is to create a cohesive and accurate information message that can stand alone in a room without us there to interpret.

Optimize Your Extract

It's a little thing, and I frequently forget to do it, but it makes a huge difference.

Basically, Tableau takes your calculations and stores the fields in the extract so it doesn't have to re-compute them every time the view gets opened.

Finishing Touches to Avoid Clickin' Confusion

How often do you find users get confused clicking around on your viz? Surprisingly, a lot, right? You think it's fairly simple, just click to filter.  But most people double-click. Telling everyone not to double-click is pointless. So they double click and zoom in on a chart and are completely baffled as to how to get out of it (it's not entirely intuitive). Or they click on a chart that doesn't zoom, but it highlights and dims all the other values (which you don't want).

Why So Blue?

I don't know if you've noticed, but I love blue.

In the olden days, before the internet and according to my son, when I lived in a cave and cooked over a pit with the newly discovered fire, we did all our charts in shades of grey.  Because only the execs had color printers.   As a result, people were so excited to create some colorful reports for the big giant heads that things got a little out of control. Some of the reports were so horrific in color, that I think they may have caused color blindness.

As a result, when I was asked to use color, I used blue.  Blue is a reasonable choice - almost everyone likes blue - both men and women, and it's associated with calm and clarity. It doesn't conflict with other colors or make a statement. Also, if someone chooses to print your blueful report on a black and white printer, you can pretty much trust the shades of grey that will come out.

5 Tips to Good Vizzin'

Before Tableau, I made a lot of dashboards in Excel. It has been quite difficult to free myself from the constraints that Excel (or other standard tools) forced upon me when it came to storytelling with data. Let me explain.

In the past, with other tools, I would envision the outcome first and work backwards.  Often I would be specifically asked for a certain type of chart showing certain information; sometimes I would be asked to investigate a problem, but I would still jump to the type of chart(s) I needed first and then go about getting my data into the state needed to put it in those charts.

10 Steps to Color in Tableau

Download the workbook and save it for future reference:

Learn About Tableau

Finishing Touches: Fonts

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If you are like me, fonts are the last thing you think of when building a viz or dashboard.  To make my life simpler, I decided to put together a few font combinations for quick reference.

I don't know much about font combining  (other than what I've read here), so I try to keep the number to a minimum and try not to have them competing for dominance.

This is pretty much the list of fonts I use in Tableau. I know they aren't exciting, but I can count on how they will behave on different Windows or Mac versions and different browsers. Besides, when it comes to dashboards, I don't want the font to be the star anymore than the colors. The font is there like any other element; to help convey the message that the data contains.

Please note that I'm talking about work, work here. When it comes to play visualizations, all bets are off and all fonts are fair game, even ComicSans.

Canada's Electoral Voting Districts

Canada's next federal election isn't until October 2015, so this viz is almost 2 years too early.  But I was so excited to receive the shape files for the electoral districts yesterday that I had to play.


Big, HUGS to Zen men Allan Walker, and Craig Bloodsworth at The Information Lab and Adam Riley at Altyrx and  who created Tableau Mapping Monday and the central Tableaumappingbi repository for the shape files they've created.  There's also a LinkedIn mapping group for discussions.

Excel and Tableau: When a Table is just a Table (and not data)

There's all kinds of 'analysts', but perhaps the most prolific is the Excel Analyst.  That pretty much encomapses everyone who works with computers.  Excel has provided everyone with the ability to conduct a wide range of analysis and reporting for years.  Anyone can make a chart or table in Excel - you don't need an understanding or training in data analysis.  However, things can get confusing when we move to an analysis tool like Tableau.
Part of the problem is that most of us use the terms Table and Data interchangeably (because we can).  Here's the rub:

Tables, charts and maps are presentations of Data.
In relational databases, Data is stored in Tables.
So a Table can present Data or contain it.

The problem occurs when we try to take a presentation Table and use it as Data for analysis to make a presentation Table or Chart.  Confused?  Yeah, don't worry, lot's of people get confused by this.  It's why most Open Data is available as a presentation Table and not Data.

Tableau Designs

CLICK TO VIEW DASHBOARDS

October was Design Month over at Tableau Public and a whole bunch of talented bloggers shared their design tips on their blogs or over at Tableau.   Check em out!

Steve Wexler  http://www.datarevelations.com/hey-your-tableau-public-viz-sucks-revisited.html
Peter Gilks http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/blog/2013/10/peter-gilks-skyscrapers-new-york-2162
Ryan Sleeper http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/blog/2013/10/leveraging-color-improve-your-data-visualization-2174
Jewel Loree http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/blog/2013/10/choosing-colors-accessibility-2180
Ryan Robilite http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/blog/2013/10/communicating-ideas-if-content-king-then-context-god-2198
Anya A'Hearn http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/blog/2013/10/design-your-data-viz-product-designer-2195
Designers in the wild http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/blog/2013/10/your-tableau-design-tips-2200
Ben Jones (2012) http://dataremixed.com/2012/05/data-visualization-clarity-or-aesthetics/

3 Ways to Play with Reference Lines

Here's 3 examples of playing with color, reference lines and parameters that I presented at the Tableau Customer Conference 2013 along with a bunch of terribly clever people. The other presenters workbooks can be obtained here TCC13 Rapid Fire Tips and Tricks.

I've updated the workbook to make it easier to follow.  Download the workbook to save as future reference.  Enjoy!

The detailed instructions to produce example #3 can be found in a previous post Replicating a New York Times d3js chart.

Replicating a New York Times d3.js Chart with Tableau

Click to view the interactive at the NYT by Shan Carter and Kevin Quealy

I am a huge, HUGE, fan of the visual design work created at the New York Times.  I have been following their work since Amanda Cox joined in 2005, when there was a noticeable change in the quality of visualizations.  (Here is an example of Amanda's process for the Facebook IPO piece in 2012.)

There's an amazing bunch of people on that design team - and they are very generous with sharing their expertise; you can follow their process at Chartsnthings.  Much of their interactive work is created with d3.js which I haven't learned and had always hoped that eventually I might be able to produce something similar with Tableau.

Well, I think I have.  It's not perfect, but it's close.

Google Online Takedown Requests: a Lesson in Extract Aggregations

CLICK ME!  CLICK ME!

Tis the season of visualization contests.

I've entered this viz in the Visualizing Online Takedown Contest at Visualizing.org.  You should check out the submissions, there's some truly inspiring work there.

As you can imagine, this was a large chunk of data (600k+ rows) for Tableau Public, which restricts rows to 100k.  Being used to using massive amounts of data in Tableau Professional, I of course forgot about this restriction until I went to publish it to the web on the morning of the contest submission.

In order to publish it I had to aggregate the data to month from day/minute.  Unfortunately, I had presented the data at the week level, which is not an option for extract aggregation, so I also had to change some of -the views.  Note to self:  add this to the Ideas on Tableau Community.

Finishing Touches: Sources and URLs in Tooltips

CLICK ME!  CLICK ME!

Have you ever played with your data for so long that you don't know if there's really a story there or if you've just exhausted your curiosity and now aren't really that interested in telling anyone what you found?  I have that problem with writing conclusions - I want to write 'see above' and be done with it.

This meteorite analysis ran way too long.  The data was made available for a visualization challenge with Visualizing.org back in February 2013 after the Chelyabinsk meteor landed in Russia.  I downloaded the data, played with it and then couldn't tell if there was any there there.  I needed to either put it away or find more data.  I put it away.

I'm sharing it now because it has a sweet tip that I learned in Stephen McDaniel and Eileen McDaniel's Tableau Dashboard workshop:  adding URLs to tooltips.  This is a great way to provide links to the data sources on your dashboard.