Steve’s Blog

I want to work with, not around, Tableau

By |2011-09-20T19:37:04+00:00September 20th, 2011|General Discussions|

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 [...]

Tracking STDs, HIV and AIDS in Texas

By |2011-09-16T22:45:49+00:00September 16th, 2011|Health and Social Issues|

Overview The Texas State Legislature’s recent and sweeping funding cuts to all family planning organizations – including the complete defunding of Planned Parenthood – has lead Data Revelations to examine historical data on sexually-transmitted diseases (STDs) and HIV / AIDS and suggest what the case count and incidence rates will look like in the near [...]

My Evil Visualization

By |2011-08-09T12:34:41+00:00August 9th, 2011|Sports and Entertainment|

My entry in Tableau Public's Evil Viz (dark map) contest. I used a photo-to-cross stitch generator to map the photo to a grid.  None of the generators I've looked at have an export to CSV so there was a lot of cutting and pasting and then mapping to lat / long coordinates. Powered by Tableau

Hopefulness and Hopelessness – Voices of the Vulnerable During Economic Crisis

By |2011-07-25T17:03:05+00:00July 25th, 2011|Health and Social Issues|

Overview Last year, UN Global Pulse launched a large-scale mobile phone-based survey that asked people from India, Iran, Mexico, Uganda, and Ukraine how they were dealing with the effects of the global economic crisis. The survey (conducted from May-August 2010) asked two multiple choice and three open-ended questions focusing on economic perceptions. Note: The fully [...]

Top ONE Feature Request for Tableau

By |2011-07-13T15:55:30+00:00July 13th, 2011|Business Visualizations|

I was originally planning to write a top 10 Tableau feature request, but my latest project begs me to focus on just one issue. I'm currently documenting how a truly zaftig collection of dashboards was put together and how it should be maintained. I am struck at just how much effort I (and soon my [...]

A little more on Likert scale questions

By |2011-03-20T14:12:56+00:00March 20th, 2011|Business Visualizations|

I came across a terrific blog post from Ross Perez who cites a really clever Tableau technique from Andy Cotgreave. Continuing where we left off with our discussion from The Likert Question Question, in the interactive example at the end of this post we display Likert bars, but allow viewers to see the details by [...]