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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DIY Chord Diagrams in Tableau - by Noah Salvaterra

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DIY Chord Diagrams in Tableau - by Noah Salvaterra

Noah has been called "ridiculous", for his ability to make just about anything happen in Tableau, as readers of Jonathan Drummey's Drawing with Numbers have already seen. This post is no exception. I knew this was cooking, and my jaw still dropped.

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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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Tableau JS API 101

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Tableau JS API 101

In this post we start with the very, VERY, basics of setting up a simple webpage, embedding a Tableau viz in it, and then adding elements to your webpage that will interact with the Tableau viz. If you already are familiar with the JS API, check back in a few dojo lessons and we will move onto interacting with other web applications to do things like enable voice and gesture control, add sound or haptic feedback, or even apply it to an actual business use case :-p.  If you don’t even really know what html is, this is the place for you to get started on the path to JS API awesome.

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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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Building a Visualization of Transit System Data Using GTFS

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Building a Visualization of Transit System Data Using GTFS

The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) defines a common format for public transportation schedules and associated geographic information. GTFS "feeds" allow public transit agencies to publish their transit data and developers to write applications that consume that data in an interoperable way.  This post shows you how to use this data to create interactive transit maps in Tableau.

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Give that Tableau Workbook a Makeover with "Find and Replace Gone Wild!"

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Give that Tableau Workbook a Makeover with "Find and Replace Gone Wild!"

So here is the use case.  Lets say your corporate font just got changed from Arial to Segoe UI.  Or, you are just plain tired of having to format your Quick Filters, turn on and off your those pesky tooltip buttons, or want all your field labels to always be hot pink with glitter.  I am still waiting for the glitter feature in Tableau by the way.... hint hint.  You could spend a day changing  your workbooks, yawn!  If you are lucky you have a corporate Sugar Daddy who will buy you Power Tools, an amazing product, do that.  But if not, you can get similar results from DIY Find and Replace in your favorite text editor.  I use Notepad ++ on a PC or Sublime Text on a Mac

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Create multiple custom map layers in Mapbox that you can toggle on and off in Tableau

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Create multiple custom map layers in Mapbox that you can toggle on and off in Tableau

This adds onto the Mapbox customization for Tableau by showing you how to:

  • Import custom shapefiles
  • Edit them in QGIS (optional)
  • Style them in Mapbox
  • Add them to a Tableau .tms so you can toggle them on and off in many combinations to help your visual analysis.
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Fast and Fabulous Custom Maps using Mapbox in Tableau

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Fast and Fabulous Custom Maps using Mapbox in Tableau

So the last time I wanted a custom map, I ended up building my own WMS and spending months and $’s to get the map I wanted.  If you followed that advice - good for you. You and I can now drink at at Tableau conference and tell the young’ins about how we used to have to walk uphill in the snow, wearing only flip flops and a Magnum BI t-shirt, while being pelted with popsicles to get our maps. Then one day recently, I had a cocktail with Allan Walker (that insane mapping Zen dude) who pointed out that if you just opened up a .tms file in notepad, there just wasn’t all that much to it but a wee bit of xml. 

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4th Grade Viz-tastic-ness

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4th Grade Viz-tastic-ness

Last Friday, I had the pleasure of being a guest speaker in my 4th grader, Max's computer class, on the topic of Data Visualization.  They had just started to learn about creating spreadsheets in Excel, and so I used that as the basis for how to communicate effectively with data using Tableau. We started with a table of data in Excel, where we captured very basic data about Gender, Age, Birthday, Favorite Sports, Movies, Games, Foods, etc. and used this to discuss the following topics and build a dashboard all in 45 minutes!:

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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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Drought

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Drought

This is a piece that was created for the Tableau  #data14 #vizasart contest  While traveling through California on Holiday last week, I was struck by the different levels of attention paid to the drought.   From the assumed political correctness of Northern California, to the angry “Congress created dust bowl” signs along the I5, to the humorous public service announcements in Southern California about “Breaking-up with your green lawn”, the drought was present all along the state.   I wanted to create an artistic piece based on precipitation data to convey the lack of rain and its effects.

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