Small Multiple Flows in Tableau

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Small Multiple Flows in Tableau

Small Multiple Flows live up to their name, combining small multiples and flow elements in a single viz. This allows us to combine a set of events, providing an intense data visualization about these events, while also connecting one event to the next via the flow element. This technique does need a viewer to invest some time into understanding the various pieces of the visual. There is a lot going on, thus it will definitely require effort and a little time on the viewer’s part (and why I put detailed legends on both visualizations).

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Layering data for custom Tableau visualizations

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Layering data for custom Tableau visualizations

This post outlines a method that has been shared before in the Tableau community. I was initially introduced to it by Noah Salvaterra’s Chord Diagram a while back. 

I am going to walk you through a layering technique, which allows use, and re-use of a single axis in Tableau. This can be done at different levels of granularity, different fields entirely or completely synchronized throughout, thus it can adapt pretty well to various use cases. Need to create a dual-axis in a single axis? This technique can enable this for us (as long as you need the same mark type that is). 

So What? With this technique you can build more detailed and very customized visualizations directly within Tableau (without the need for extensive data prep).

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Telling a Story in Tableau

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This short post is around trying to create an article like structure with in-line visualizations all within Tableau. Inspiration for this pulls from sites like 538 and polygraph as well as several authors from the Tableau Public community (like the one noted below, this recent VotD).

There have been many examples across the Tableau Public community showing the data storytelling capabilities of Tableau. These include leveraging additional JS libraries (via API/embed) like reveal.js (thank you Jeff Shaffer!), but others that caught my eye recently where examples of building out an entire story in a long form Tableau dashboard. Here is one example that Rob Radburn posted recently that got me thinking. Note: there are several others, this one by Rob is just a single recent example. 

I decided to see just how much work it is to do something like this, all within Tableau. The answer... not all that much. Like every tool, Tableau makes some hard things easy and some easy things hard. This type of visualization is a great example of the former and demonstrates the creativity that Tableau can empower it's Desktop users with. The viz story is just a simple collection of visualization sheets and text boxes, you can download the workbook to see how I went about laying out the story. The viz below is best viewed in landscape, hope you like it! 

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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#DATA14 Presentation: How to Create a Viz that Stops Traffic

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#DATA14 Presentation: How to Create a Viz that Stops Traffic

I had a wonderful time presenting at the 2014 Tableau Conference, along with Daniel Montgomery and Paul Banoub on "How to Create a Viz that stops Traffic.  The session was hosted by the amazing talented Jewel Loree.  Below is the presenation

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Using Design and Emotion to Create a Data Visualization with Impact

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Using Design and Emotion to Create a Data Visualization with Impact

This is the slideshow from my session at the Tableau 2013 Customer Conference.  This session will walk through the process of creating a data visualization based on product design principles and ideas, focusing on overall product goals and user context. A step by step walk through of the design process for two data products, "Twitter TV Set" and "Firework Injuries" will be used as examples to highlight the impact that design and emotion can add to a visualization.  

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