By Steve Wexler and Jeffrey Shaffer January 9, 2017 Please also see follow-up post. Overview Makeover Monday, started by Andy Kriebel in 2009 and turned into a weekly social data project by Kriebel and Andy Cotgreave in 2016, is now one of the biggest community endeavors in data visualization. By the end of 2016 there were over 3,000 [...]
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 [...]
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 In an October 2015 meeting of the Tableau Zen Masters each Zen Master was asked to name his / her favorite thing about Tableau. Most people started by saying “well, besides the community, my favorite thing is…” At the time I said “undo”. Don’t laugh. Let’s not take it for granted that with Tableau [...]
Overview I received an e-mail inquiry about weighted data recently and realized that while I cover this in my survey data class I had not yet posted anything about it here. Time to remedy that. The good news is that it is not at all difficult to work with weighted survey data in Tableau. And [...]
