All in Design

What is the Purpose of Data Analysis?

Eric Parker
Thought Leadership, Tableau Dashboards, Design

Do you ever find yourself working on a data-related project and wonder "What are we doing here?". While data-related endeavors can drive massive values, many of them are fairly directionless. Maybe there's a top-down mandate to "become more data-driven" without much thought about what that actually means.

We believe that the highest purpose of data analysis is to support informed experimentation. Creating dashboards with facts and figures is helpful, but it's really only the first step in the process.

Ready to learn about those additional steps and how you can drive value in your organization? Check out this video on the purpose of data analysis!

How to Whiteboard in Tableau (Whiteboarding Workbook)

Eric Parker
Design, Tableau Dashboards

One of the most important steps to developing a successful Tableau project is the ideation and whiteboarding phase. In the modern world, we often don't get to do that whiteboarding in person. That poses a real change. Whiteboarding in person is instantaneous. It's easy to erase one idea and sketch another. That becomes a lot more challenging in a remote, online environment.

Even the best online sketching tools are a bit clunky, not to mention it's hard to sketch well on a computer screen with a freehand or stylus.

Build a Custom Color Palette for Tableau

Ollie Linley
Design

Have you ever needed to use your own colors in Tableau? Maybe you need to use your company’s colors, or a brand’s colors, but you’re not sure how to save those colors into Tableau for repeated use.

You absolutely can add your own custom color palettes to Tableau. You’ll need to add some crucial code to the preferences file to do it!

Build a Homepage for Your Tableau Dashboards

Ollie Linley
Design, Tableau Dashboards

Navigating around the dashboards you’ve built can be difficult. How do you build a good homepage? How can you easily toggle from one dashboard to the next without it feeling clunky? Is it even possible for Tableau dashboards to feel easy to navigate?

In today’s video, we answer all those questions. We’ll build a great homepage that allows you navigate to all your dashboards, using icons and buttons. We’ll create dropdown, hamburger menus and a home button to help your users navigate to other dashboards, or go straight back to the homepage.

These skills can make your dashboards feel slick, professional, and user-friendly!

Exploring International Birth Rate Data in Tableau

Eric Parker
Design, Tableau How-Tos

How do you approach a new data set in Tableau? Do you spend a while studying the fields and data types? Or do you Google what other people have built using similar data? Maybe you like jumping straight into building to see how things shake out?

I lean toward the latter. Building visuals allows you to learn the data quickly, develop insights, and expose data issues (let's be honest, there are almost always wrinkles to work out of the data).

Data Dashboard Design Best Practices

Eric Parker
Data, Design, Tableau Dashboards

Effective data dashboard design is an art. It requires meticulous attention to detail. It includes visualizing the right data, displaying the appropriate level of granularity, designing an efficient layout, and making a number of minute design decisions so the data hits your user "just right".

If you're looking for a checklist of design elements to review before your next dashboard rollout, you've came to the right place! In this video, we discuss the following 15 design best practices:

Display a Single Dimension Across Multiple Columns in Tableau

Eric Parker
Table Calculations, Tableau Calculations, Design

Sometimes, you have too many values in a dimension on the rows shelf in your Tableau worksheet and end up with a scroll bar. Annoying, right? Scroll bars mean your users are less likely to see the data at the bottom of your worksheet because it it out of sight and out of mind.

One idea I've heard discussed is, what if you could break the data into multiple columns? For example, instead of displaying 50 states as a single column of 50 rows, could you display it at 2 columns or 25 rows?

How and Why to Build Tree Maps in Tableau

Ollie Linley
Design

We're looking at Tree Maps this week! If you're trying to show breakdowns of the whole in Tableau, you need to have Tree Maps in your tool kit.

Tree Maps are amazing because:

  1. They're particularly good at representing data with long tails. 

  2. They can represent data in a hierarchical structure (we can build Tree Maps within Tree Maps)!

  3. They're space-efficient, and allow us to visualize many dimensions or measures in one view. 

How to Build Dual Axis Charts in Tableau

Ollie Linley
Design

Dual Axis charts are one of the most versatile chart types in Tableau. Technically, this is just a view that houses two measures with their independent axes.

But, the beauty of Dual Axis charts is found in the creative ways we can format them. We can use these charts to achieve all sorts of crazy “illusions”… like showing two different labels for a single bar, or creating rounded bars, or making donut charts!

Combine Multiple Filters into a Single Swappable Filter in Tableau

Eric Parker
Design

How often do you build a Tableau dashboard and feel like it has too many filters? This happens to me all the time! You don't know what to do with them, right? Make two rows of filters? Ugh. Make a massive column? That's a lot of screen real estate. Add show/hide buttons so users can toggle a layout container on and off the page? That doesn't seem ideal either. What if someone doesn't realize they can show filters?

Compare Running Sum Year Over Year in Tableau

Eric Parker
Tableau Calculations, Tableau Dates, Design

One of my favorite, underrated visuals in Tableau is to compare running sum values year over year! It is a great tool to compare student enrollments, sales and even personal achievements like miles run or silver coins found metal detecting! :-P

Would it be helpful to see how the running sum of values for this year stacks up to previous years? Check out this video to learn how you can compare cumulative values year over year!

How to Add Info Buttons to Tableau Dashboards

Eric Parker
Design, Tableau Dashboards, Tableau General Knowledge

Does your dashboard feel cluttered because you're trying to communicate too much supporting information to your user? Making sure you cover everything your user needs to know can leave your output feeling more like an essay than a data-driven dashboard.

Info buttons are a staple of Tableau dashboards. They allow you to pack so much additional information to a dashboard without cluttering the view for users.

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