Tableau Padawan: Faster Nested Sorts

Tableau Padawan: Faster Nested Sorts

Tableau's sorting behavior is somewhere between "a little weird" and "WTF?!?" for those of used to the nested sorting behavior we can get in Excel and other tools. This is one case where Tableau's "mental model" of sorting doesn't match the mental model of many users, if you'd like Tableau to change this you can vote for the Independent Sorting feature request. Explaining why Tableau sorts the way it does would take a much longer post, for now, I'm going to skip the "why" for the "how" and the "what" and jump into my preferred & faster way to do nested sorting using an ad-hoc calculation.

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Tableau Padawan - When the Pill You See is Not the Pill You Use

Tableau Padawan - When the Pill You See is Not the Pill You Use

Today’s lesson is about understanding Tableau as a data driven drawing engine: change the data and we’ll change what Tableau draws. In this case we’re going to change the data to change the color. Recently I received a question where someone had created a heatmap with a diverging color palette like this (demo built using Tableau’s CoffeeChain sample data).

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Concatenating Rows into String Lists in Tableau for #VisualizeNoMalaria

Concatenating Rows into String Lists in Tableau for #VisualizeNoMalaria

As part of the Tableau Foundation/PATH/Zambia Ministry of Health #VisualizeNoMalaria project to eliminate malaria in Zambia by 2020 we had a request to build a “report” to show when health facilities have not submitted malaria incidence data so that administrators and staff can be notified in an easy-to-ready way.   element (such as all the product categories a customer has purchased), etc. Read on for how to do this yourself and learn a bit more about the different levels of detail of data that we work with in Tableau.

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Padawan Dojo: SUMIF() in Tableau

Padawan Dojo: SUMIF() in Tableau

Here at DataBlick we're known for doing amazing things with Tableau and teaching others. Our Padawan Dojo series is for new users (and users who help others) to learn how to do your own great things in Tableau. This lesson is about: learning an important mental model for working with Tableau, understanding when and how to do the equivalent of an Excel SUMIF() in Tableau, and finally how to validate the results.  

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Hive Plot Part Deux in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

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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Dynamic Small Multiples in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

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

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

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

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

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 AllanChris, 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

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 WalkerNoah Salvaterra and Anya A’Hearn for general help and guidance along the way.

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Tableau JS API 101

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

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

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!"

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

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

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

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

#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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