Overview In my experience the number one impediment to success with Tableau is getting data in a format that plays nicely with Tableau. Alteryx is a combination ETL (extract, transform, load), geospatial, and statistical modeling solution that just may solve this “getting-the-data-right” problem. And it plays very nicely with Tableau. In this blog I will [...]
Overview I was reading a very interesting blog post this weekend from which I learned that counseling may do little to help young people with drinking problems. Specifically, counseling reduces the average number of drinks consumed from 13.7 drinks per week to 12.2 drinks per week. I wondered if a visual might drive this point [...]
Overview The catalyst for this post comes from my recent attendance of a Tableau user group where the presenter demonstrated a dashboard that featured a packed bubble chart. I spent a lot of time shaking my head – not because this was a very poor visualization choice -- but because the presenter was in a [...]
... and some thoughts on the evolving art and science of visualizing data I tend to gravitate towards occupations that are hard to explain. I started my professional life, and continue to be, a music arranger and orchestrator. I can tell by people’s perplexed looks that they are wondering if I’m the guy that decides where [...]
Overview I’ve had a spate of requests from clients to show how survey responses rank across different categories and I’ve come up with a way that makes it very easy to see where the big stories are. Note that this approach works for any measure that can be ranked, not just survey responses. Let’s see [...]
Note: Since writing this post in 2014, I have, in fact, become a fan of sparklines. That said, I continue to see many instances where I think the dashboard author could present data more clearly using a different approach. Make sure to read the comments at the end of the post. I’ve never been a [...]
Overview One of the new features in Tableau 8.1 that Tableau Software is trumpeting quite a bit is one-click Box and Whisker Plot generation. While I appreciate the new functionality, this chart type doesn’t “sing” to me the as much as jittering does. Indeed, this “jittering” capability was the BIG discovery for me in 2013. [...]
If I see a visualization that is poorly designed or worse, misleading, I'm going to say something about it. I hope you will do the same. In March of 2013 Stephen Few published a scathing review of Tableau 8. Few's thesis was that Tableau had caved to marketing pressure and its new product would encourage users to [...]
I recently attended the Tableau Customer Conference. It was a great conference and if you are into Tableau you should definitely go to next year's event (see http://tcc14.tableauconference.com/seattle/). In any case, during the myriad networking opportunities I was very pleased by the number of people who told me how much they had gotten out of a [...]
In this installment we’ll look at Utah State University’s publication of student engagement results. Utah State is one of many collegiate institutions that have participated in NSSE’s national survey of student engagement (see http://nsse.iub.edu/ and http://nsse.iub.edu/html/about.cfm). Special thanks to Allan Walker for making the underlying data available to me. Note: I've published four sets of [...]
