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 [...]
Overview Several weeks ago the data visualization community broke into justified outrage over an inexcusably misleading dual-axis chart from Americans United for Life. I plan to write an article about this and other “ethically wrong” visualizations in a few weeks but in the meantime I encourage you to read these excellent posts from Alberto Cairo [...]
Overview I recently wrote about emotional vs. accurate comparisons and several people questioned whether the word “emotional” was appropriate. (Several people questioned my assertions, too. You can read their comments here.) For this discussion I’ll use the term “engagement” in place of “emotion” and we’ll look into the challenges of creating public-facing visualizations that attract [...]
Overview I've conducted a lot of Tableau training classes and have found three things that confuse students simply because of the nomenclature Tableau uses for these things. These three terms are Headers Table Calculations Quick Filters Headers Consider the chart below that has both mark labels and an axis along the bottom. Figure 1 [...]
Overview Figure 1 – Bar charts are better than pie charts are better than donut charts. Most of the time. As anyone who has read this blog knows I’m definitely a “bar charts are better than pie charts are better than donut charts” kind of guy, at least when you need to [...]
Overview I’ll admit that I have a problem with treemaps in Tableau, but it's not because the chart type is in some way inferior. My problem is with how people use - and misuse - treemaps. Here’s a good example of misuse. Instead of displaying something straightforward that looks like this… Figure 1 -- The humble, [...]
