Even though Tableau has been round for a number of years now, there is a dearth of books out there to guide new users. To get the most out of Tableau, you don’t want to approach chart making in the same way that you do in Excel. The videos and webinars that Tableau offers are great, …
Category Archive
for: ‘Good Examples’
Tableau as a Dashboard Platform
While recently at the Tableau User Conference, I wondered about the feasibility of using Tableau to produce ‘proper’ dashboards – that is, a dashboard with sparklines, and the right level of information, not just four revving gauges and a 3D pie chart.. I chose to (mostly) recreate the dashboard that I created in Excel for …
Using Google Chart API to create dashboards and sparklines
A few posts back I talked about using a plugin to the jquery javascript library to create sparklines in blog posts. One of my readers suggested using Google’s chart api to instead create the sparklines. From Google: What is the Google Chart API? The Google Chart API lets you dynamically generate charts with a URL …
American Time Use Survey – How the WSJ could do better
I recently posted about how the Wall Street Journal’s graphical interpretation of the American Time Use Survey left something to be desired. Their choice of both multiple pie charts and stacked bars with too many segments made comparisons difficult. The time use survey is essentially “how does the average American spend their day” with categories …
Web-deployed dashboards without Flash or expensive BI tools (Protovis)
I discussed recently about how new javascript libraries (especially Protovis) have the potential to revolutionize information delivery to the web. As I haven’t seen any examples of these libraries being used to create a dashboard, I thought I’d be the first. This is my first iteration (click for the big, real version) – don’t read anything into the choice …
BBC election visualizations
I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing national elections in the UK and USA. Aside from the fact that the run up to the UK elections last a month, compared to the year plus of US elections, the day of the election in the UK is much more enjoyable for the data guru, partly because of …
What our kids are learning
Being in the data business, I tend to critique most charts or visualizations I see. I am pleased to note that not only is my son’s kindergarten already pushing an understanding of data, but that so far the charts have all been of the bar variety. While of course one could labor on the excessively …
ER visits due to consumer products: Tableau Public
Tableau Software has just released Tableau Public – a free version of their data visualization tool that will revolutionize how we show information. To showcase its abilities I created the visualization linked below. WARNING: I wanted to push the limits of Tableau – there are 98,000 rows of data shown on the chart, so give …
Data visualization challenge: my dashboard design
Finally we get to the choices I made for my dashboard entry into Chandoo’s data visualization challenge. The challenge already directed us to make the dashboard focused on the two year performance of the sales people. I’ll break this post into the five or so parts of the (single screen) dashboard. Easily overlooked, but vital, …
Charting data with one disproportionally large value
Datavis tweeted about a fun chart he found comparing ‘kills’ between the top animals – I’m not sure the data are meant to be real or what ‘kills’ means, but the point is made that humans are by far the worst offenders. Part of the emphasis is that the human number is literally ‘off the …
