Note: Major thanks to Nazirah Garrison and Christie Clark at Tableau for suggesting this approach. Overview With Tableau 10.x it is in fact possible to get your survey data, “just so” without having to invest in new tools and / or a engage in a time-consuming, error-prone procedure every time you need receive updated survey [...]
Overview So, you’ve created a wonderful collection of survey data dashboards that have innumerable demographic filters so that users can, for example, just see responses from left-handed Los Angeles Lakers fans between the ages of 34 and 39. So, what’s the problem? Actually, there are two problems. The first occurs when extreme filtering reduces the [...]
Overview Imagine a terrific introductory college course presented by a terrific professor. That’s the feeling I had in reading The Truthful Art, Alberto Cairo’s follow up to his first book The Functional Art. Whereas his first book took a “look at what you can and should do” approach to help people see and understand data, [...]
Overview As readers of this blog know, I have my problems with donut charts. That said, I acknowledge that they can be cool and, under certain circumstances, enormously useful. On a recent flight I was struck by how much I liked the animated “estimated time to arrival” donut chart that appeared on my personal TV [...]
Overview My obsession with finding the best way to visualize data will often infiltrate my dreams. In my slumbers I find myself dragging Tableau pills in an ongoing pursuit to come up with the ideal dashboard that shines light on whatever data set has invaded my psyche. But is the pursuit of the perfect dashboard [...]
Updated on September 11, 2018. Note: Special thanks to Joe Mako who suggested this approach. Overview I’m fortunate that when I work with survey data that is not well-coded I can take out my trusty copy of Tableau Prep, EasyMoprh, or Alteryx Designer and get my data “just so.” But what if you don’t have [...]
Overview This past week I enjoyed looking at and interacting with Matt Chambers’ car color popularity bump chart. Figure 1 -- Matt Chambers' car color popularity bump chart. You can find the original Datagraver visualization upon which this was based here. The key to this dashboard is interactivity as it’s hard to parse all [...]
Some thoughts on functionality, beauty, crown molding, and lollipop charts Overview I’ve been writing a book about business dashboards with Jeffrey Shaffer and Andy Cotgreave and we’ve conducted screen-sharing sessions with dozens of people and reviewed scores of dashboards. We had a particularly enjoyable jam session with Tableau Zen Master Mark Jackson last week. When [...]
Overview I’m a big fan of Andy Kriebel’s and Andy Cotgreave’s Makeover Monday challenge. For those of you not familiar with this, each week Kriebel and Cotgreave find an existing visualization / data set and ask the data visualization community to come up with alternative ways to present the same data. As Cotgreave points out [...]
Overview As I’m mentioned before the number one impediment to success with visualizing survey data in Tableau is getting the data in the right format so you can do all the dazzling things you want to do. Up until very recently none of the survey tools vendors had done anything to make things easy so [...]
