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 [...]
Overview I spend a lot of time with survey data and much of this data revolves around gauging people’s sentiments and tendencies using either a Likert Scale or a Net Promoter Score (NPS) type of thing. Examples Here’s an example of gauging sentiment using a 5-point Likert scale. Indicate how satisfied you are with the [...]
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 [...]
