Extensions for Tableau

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Extensions for Tableau

As you probably already know if you have followed some of my content over the past couple of years, I am pretty excited about the release of the Extensions API for Tableau. This blog is an overdue follow up from #TC18, where Tamás Földi and I presented on Extensions, demoing a number of extensions covering both advanced visualization types and capabilities (like write back). This post provides some of my own perspectives on Extensions in Tableau as well as the content presented during TC18, along with some new stuff.

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Talk to your Tableau Dashboard

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Talk to your Tableau Dashboard

Shouldn't an author be able to explain their Tableau Dashboard to every person who views it? Of course they should! This capability should be available to authors and accessible to their end users, regardless of the end user's abilities. We should also make Tableau's awesome interactive capabilities as accessible as we can as web users have vastly diverse abilities.

We noodled around some ideas of how we could enable the Tabitha project for those who did not want to write any code. This blog is the (hopefully) first step toward that effort…

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X, Y and a bit of Z - Cheater 3D Orthographic Views & Making everything "Spatial"

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X, Y and a bit of Z - Cheater 3D Orthographic Views & Making everything "Spatial"

Anya must have pinged me 10 times over the course of the last week asking me questions about rendering 3d cars in Tableau. I figured it must have something to do with curing malaria. My reply was a bit ironic given the fact that I’ve done my own 3d car. I did it for fun though… I don’t like being told I can’t do stuff. it just doesn’t work as part of a production workbook. Well… from a performance standpoint maybe we will get there soon. But for now my suggestion was to pick a good angle and then drive a steamroller over it and just make it into polygons. I really should have seen the next question coming, but she asked how to do that. I was stumped. My best idea was, hire a graphic artist to trace it for you…

Last night she told me she solved it using QGIS… mind explosion! Of course! Why not use mapping software for this? Geography isn’t the only thing spatial. Why shouldn’t you use QGIS to map your car, your plane, the shelves of your supermarket, what have you. I always thought background images were misplaced in Tableau, I wonder if this is what they were thinking when they put it under maps. Latitude and Longitude are just a special name for x and y (or is it the other way around?). Why not hijack Tableau’s mapping capabilities and import your polygons as custom shapes?

I’ve gone to great lengths to hack multiple layers onto maps, so I was excited to hear multi-layered maps will be coming to Tableau, but this opens the door to hacking that feature into all sorts of things. Someone once told me that everything in Tableau is a scatterplot but I’m starting to think maybe everything should be a map. Oh… I am going to crash that Beta so hard!

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On the topic of community: & being friends and mentors.

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On the topic of community: & being friends and mentors.

First - sign up and sign up for Emily Kunde's Mentor Match program, and have a chance to win an hour of help with either Allan or Anya as well as other prizes to be announced on Emily's site soon.  

This friendship started with a Tweet:  March 5th, 2014 Tweet to @AllanWalkerIT help…..!  ? "Since you are the king of Tableau Maps, I wanted to see if you had any suggestions?"  For over two years now, we have worked together on many collaborations.   We hope with a quick review of how we have expanded our skills by working together, you can learn from our take-aways and find friends and mentors to work with. 

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A Viz of Many (Gender) Colors

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A Viz of Many (Gender) Colors

Pink is for girls and blue is for boys.  How pervasive is this association?

This viz updates live to reflect the crowd voted winning color palette choice.  Tha's right,  this is a live updating Tableau Public viz that uses data from a Google Sheet without needing a web connector!!!!  Thanks to some Allan Walker glitter (which is always black).

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Kids can help #VisualizeNoMalaria!

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Kids can help #VisualizeNoMalaria!

Hi, my name is Max. I am eleven years old and I am going into sixth grade.  I LOVE video games and Legos. Yesterday, though instead of playing Minecraft, I volunteered by tracing buildings with my Mom, to help support the fight against Malaria in Zambia.  

I did this because I like to be in the wilderness and go camping and have been bitten by mosquitos many times.  I can’t imagine getting sick or dying from just being bitten by a mosquito and don’t think any kid should worry or suffer from this.

It is really easy to help.  If you want to help too, go this link http://www.tableau.com/about/blog/2016/7/help-visualizenomalaria-56784  and follow the instructions.

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Hive Plot Part Deux in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

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Hive Plot Part Deux in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

Note: This is an incremental post to the circular and hive plot network graphing post. When looking back at my network graphing post recently I remembered one piece of the Hive Plot that I wanted to crack and didn't get to in that original effort. One design element that helps distinguish the Hive Plot is the concept of splitting an interconnected axis into two to help visualize this aspect of a network. I think this helps to view the interconnectivity of an axis within the network you are visualizing. Also, with tools like Tableau, we could even allow for an expand/collapse feature on this axis.

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Jonathan Drummey joining DataBlick full time!

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Jonathan Drummey joining DataBlick full time!

Last fall, man-about-Tableau Jonathan Drummey (Tableau Zen Master , Tableau Forums Ambassador, leader of the Tableau Healthcare User Group https://community.tableau.com/groups/healthcare, Tableau blogger, etc.) started working with DataBlick part-time. He’s launched the Help Me DataBlick service and @helpmedatablick Tableau tips tweet stream and has had so much fun he’s joining DataBlick full-time! That’s right!  You can have the amazing Jonathan Drummey work on your project!  Besides project-based work Jonathan is leading our Tableau trainings, with proven, effective coursework tailored to your organizations needs. 

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Dynamic Small Multiples in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

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Dynamic Small Multiples in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

There have been a number of small multiple designs (see the list at the bottom of this post) in the past year or so and I am always a big fan of them, I figured why not take a chance at building one myself. If you have read any of my previous blogs, you may have noticed that I like the word “dynamic”, so I tried to figure out a way to incorporate a dynamic aspect into this visualization based on player data from the last six NBA seasons.

Dynamic?
One of the tricks with small multiple design is the fact that you have to lay out the graphs in a trellis panel (aka a grid). This can be accomplished by hard coding and sorting the partitioning dimension of your analysis, however, I challenged myself to calculate the location for each graph within Tableau on the fly. The reason why I wanted to do this was to be able to update, change between seasons, etc. without having to do any additional work on the trellis layout of the small multiple viz.

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Live Polar Clock in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

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Live Polar Clock in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

After taking a look at the polar clock examples in both D3 and protovis and having studied Bora Beran's great radial treemap & bar chart post it seemed very possible to do this in Tableau with just a little incremental effort. I started from Bora's workbook and went from there.

For the polar clock each radial bar needs to be based on a different unit of time. See the below graphic for how I went about laying out the radial bars and units of time for this viz (mimicking the D3 and protovis versions).

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Great Arcs in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

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Great Arcs in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

This is one of many posts on the subject of Great Arcs which ultimately lead us to the re-make of the 1983 cult classic Wargames in Tableau. I encourage you to read the whole series of posts by the wider team in addition to this one.

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The New Fabulous Mapbox Studio Tutorial - Making a more Accessible Map

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The New Fabulous Mapbox Studio Tutorial - Making a more Accessible Map

Here is an example of how beautiful your new maps can be.  This one was designed to be a background map that was elegant and provided an alternate to just the black, white, and that other one that no one uses, that come pre-designed in Tableau.   Check it out live and zoom in and out.  Notice the color gradations as you zoom in close.  Those would have taken forever to get right in Classic, not to mention how amazingly smooth it is to zoom in and out and pan around.  This is a map Ferrari!

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Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy Mapbox Maps and Layers in Tableau 9.2

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Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy Mapbox Maps and Layers in Tableau 9.2

One of the features that I am most excited about in 9.2 is the ability to add Mapbox map layers from the UI in Tableau instead of having to deal with all the .tms hackery!  If you are a beta tester for 9.2 and are publishing to Tableau Public, this is already available to you to use!  Ready to check out how easy it is now?  I’m going to use my Skyfall themed map to show off how easy it is to add multiple layers, and then we will create a “bog normal view swapper” (a very technical term that Allan Walker seems to use a lot).This will allow the user to change the maps and layers in the background of your published workbook.

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Radial Trees in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

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Radial Trees in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

This is an incremental post to navigating your family tree from a few months back. This builds off of that visualization technique to manipulate the tree into a radial view. Also, as with the original, the tree is 100% dynamic and you can reset each node in the tree as the root node, toggle between tree views as well as change the API you are analyzing.

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Alteryx Newbie Creates Dynamic Parameters in Tableau First Day by Jonathan Drummey

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Alteryx Newbie Creates Dynamic Parameters in Tableau First Day by Jonathan Drummey

I wanted to take Alteryx out for a drive to see what it could do and decided to look into the Tableau XML, in particular using Alteryx to dynamically update Tableau parameters. This is something I've worked on before (see Creating a Dynamic Parameter with a Tableau Data Blend) and last year at the Tableau Conference Bryan Brandow & Andy Kriebel demoed a solution that they'd built for Facebook with the same basic idea as my Alteryx one. The particular use case is one of the most requested ones for dynamic parameters, namely updating the parameter list as the data changes.

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Time to Get Hopping with Jump Plot by Chris DeMartini and Tom VanBuskirk

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Time to Get Hopping with Jump Plot by Chris DeMartini and Tom VanBuskirk

In preparation for the upcoming Think Data Thursday, "I didn't know that was Tablossible", this post introduces a novel graph type referred to as the “Jump Plot”. Jump Plot is the brainchild of Tom VanBuskirk and was first implemented by Chris DeMartini using Tableau. This post is a combined effort from Tom and Chris. There are pieces of this post describing the benefits that Jump Plot provides, however additional details regarding the graph type and all it can offer can be found atjumpplot.com. In short, the Jump Plot provides a new way to visualize event data, with a focus on sequence distributions and bottlenecks. 

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Tableau JS API 102

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Tableau JS API 102

Padawan Challenge:  Build a Website with 4 fully responsive Tableau Dashboard views and add an Open Parameter that affects all of them.

Hello Dojo’ers!  Ready to have some more fun with Allan, Chris, and Anya?  Get out your favorite text editor, a bag of Skittles (for little rewards here and there) and lets get to it.  

Last year at the Tableau conference, DataBlick presented a lot of artsy fartsy bits on how the whole Tableau Dashboard should be a canvas.  Data, pixels, design elements, formatting and math should be used to paint the composition of the viz as a whole on the Tableau canvas.  In this lesson, we are zooming one step out, and now a Tableau viz becomes a bit of paint on an html canvas.

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Navigating your Family History in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

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Navigating your Family History in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

We are going to build two tree views in Tableau, an ancestor view and a descendant view of a dynamically selected root person. Within this post I will walk through building the ancestor tree (a binary tree), feel free to reach out if you want more information on how the descendant tree was built, but will leave that to the imagination for now.

First things first, the credits. I started this effort with two main inputs, (1) the node tree link diagram that was explained and created by Jeffery Shaffer and (2) thedynamic parameter posts that Nelson Davis recently went through. I rely on both of these to get to the family tree viz shown here. In addition to these, I also askedAllan Walker, Noah Salvaterra and Anya A’Hearn for general help and guidance along the way.

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Comb the Hairball with BioFabric in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

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Comb the Hairball with BioFabric in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

Recently I posted about creating circular and hive plot network diagrams using Tableau and a question was posted around whether we could also execute theBioFabric network graph within Tableau. There is a lot of additional information about the BioFabric network graph at their website. The super-quick demo is a good intro to the graph if you have not seen it before.

The answer to the question posted is yes and this post is designed to walk you through the steps needed to build your own BioFabric graph within Tableau.

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