After doing an initial Design Sprint, we dig into most of our projects by hosting a whiteboard session. For more details about how to create a great environment for a successful whiteboard session, check out Kirk’s blog post from last week here.
“Just make a typical sales dashboard!”
I’m sure you have heard something similar to that. We sure have!
Or…”We have hundreds of great unused vizzes! What is wrong with these, why don’t they use them?”
Imagine you are asked the question, “How do this month’s sales compare to this same period from last year?” The simplest way to address this in Tableau would be to create some calculations.
Tools like Excel and Google sheets give you the ability to create line graphs which can distinguish lines not only with different colors, but with different shapes. You can see in the chart below there is a yellow solid-line, a red dashed-line and a blue dotted-line.
I’ve always been interested in history. World history, local history, family history, you name it. About a decade ago I spent time researching and building my family tree on geni.com. I had a good experience and it was a helpful resource. I was able to build my family tree far enough back that I found out that (supposedly) I’m distantly related to the explorer Sir Francis Drake and William the Conqueror, king of England. Who knows how reliable family trees are 10 to 25 generations back however, hah!
Tooltips are one of those overlooked features in Tableau that can add so much value. One of my checklist items before publishing to Tableau Server is “Make sure tooltips look okay.” Generally I’m just making sure some wonky calculation I built or some run-on named table calculation isn’t showing up in the tooltip.
I know the majority of folks that read this blog find it through a Google search when troubleshooting a problem and that’s great. We are so happy this resource has been helpful in that way.
Small sample sizes can make fools of us all. You see them hinder analysis all over the place.
For example…
A small sample size of votes leads to prematurely declaring the winner of a political race.
Summary tiles are a great way to quickly communicate a few meaningful measures to your end users in a dashboard. Adding indicator arrows and allowing the colors of the summary tile to change can make them even more impactful.
I was recently working with a client when we hit a roadblock. We came across a situation where we needed to create a multi-row formula and Tableau Desktop is not equipped to do that. Let me walk you through the situation.
LISTAGG is a powerful SQL command to denormalize rows data.
But, what if you don’t have access to SQL or just need a quick way to accomplish this?
If you are coming to Tableau from Excel you are probably familiar with nested if statements. Nested IF statements occur when you have multiple criteria that need to be satisfied to return a certain output. Tableau’s if statements are a little different than other tools.
If you use Tableau and work for a public facing agency, it’s likely you need to create some content that is available for public consumption. In many circumstances, it’s unlawful to display data for sample sizes below a certain headcount.
I was recently faced with a challenge when working for a client. We needed a simple way to provide row-level permissions to hundreds of Tableau Server users for 4 million+ rows of data. The data took place over 300+ sites. Some sites might only have a handful of users that needed access to view while others might have 40.
Tableau is a great data visualization tool that has some data manipulation capabilities. To get the most out of Tableau, it's helpful to have some SQL skills to prepare data. Join us for the 30-minute recording of our recent webinar below to learn how SQL can improve your Tableau experience!
When teaching, I often get asked some variation of the question, “How many rows of data can Tableau handle?”. It’s a well-intended question but it’s incomplete. Tableau technically doesn’t have a row count limitation, but row count is one of the factors that can impact performance.