Overview I was stuck earlier this month trying to cajole Tableau into doing something I needed it to do so I contacted my friend Joe Mako. Â When it comes to Tableau, Joe is the "guru's guru." (Joe was the person that showed me how to create filled maps in Tableau before Tableau had native support [...]
Bob Dylan – folk hero to thousands if not millions  – caused a furor when he appeared at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with ... an electric guitar! If you read about the incident you’ll discover that there was a mammoth sense of betrayal within the folk-centric fold. How could their hero embrace rock music? [...]
Author’s note: Stephen Few is a bastion of data visualization excellence. I encourage all of my Tableau clients and students to purchase his books, read his blogs, and attend events where he is presenting. I also submitted an entry into the competition (you can read it here). I've been troubled by both the premise and [...]
Thoughts on Standard Business Practices, User Expectations, Tableau’s Server Pricing Model, and Appealing to the Consumer’s Inner Narcissist. In my six-plus years of using Tableau I’ve created hundreds of dashboards and thousands of interactive visualizations. In observing these creations out in the field I noticed something rather disappointing – the vast majority of people for [...]
Overview Here’s something you are welcome to try – have a friend or colleague go to a Tableau Public URL that contains multiple tabs; then see how many people realize that there is in fact more than one view / dashboard available for him/her to explore. I’ve created hundreds of dashboards with multiple tabs and [...]
So, as anyone who has either taken a Tableau class with me or has read my blog posts knows, I go ballistic when I see anyone use a red/green divergent color palette. So, it's great to see people using Tableau's color-blind palette, but we need to get something straight: Dark Blue == Good, Lots Dark [...]
Overview Full Disclosure – my former company, WexTech Systems, developed and marketed the first commercial online help authoring tool, Doc-To-Help. I use online assistance a lot and expect it to be, well, helpful. Is it me, or has the quality of online help / user assistance declined in the past few years? For example, when [...]
You all know I love Tableau, yes? We're cool with that... ... but... There are times when I see Tableau guiding people to make less than ideal visualizations; situations where your have to grapple with the tool to get better results. A good example may be found at the Tableau Public blog. Here's a screen [...]
Some thoughts on Size, Color, Usability, and Engagement I am consumed by doing what I can to make sure that my Tableau visualizations (both public and for clients) are, well, consumed. While Tableau excels at helping people explore data and turn information into insights, it is still all too easy to create dashboards that neither [...]
