According to a number of questionable sources, Albert Einstein once said “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it. He who doesn’t, pays it.”
I’ve been working on a project with a client for several months where we are reporting against a sizable data source. Initially that data source took about 1-3 hours to extract locally which was okay. The faster the better, but I could live with it.
A few months ago, a blog reader, Om Parekh, reached out to me with a question. He was working on a project where he needed to compare each day to the same day the previous year. For instance, how did the third Wednesday in February, 2020 compare to the third Wednesday in February, 2019?
While working with personally identifiable information, you may need to suppress sensitive data. Let’s say that you are working with healthcare data and want to suppress patient names.
There’s an age old trick for Tableau Server published content I was recently reminded of and wanted to share. You can quickly and easily export a pdf, png or csv of a Tableau worksheet or dashboard by appending the file type at the end of a Tableau Server URL string. However, there are a few tricks to be aware of so let’s take a look.
I was recently working on a project that incorporated building management. One aspect of the management of the buildings was to ensure that regular inspections were done on each floor of each building weekly.
Progress toward a goal is a powerful way to motivate stakeholders toward achievements. Tableau is a great tool to help visualize progress toward a goal using reference lines, highlight tables, donut charts and custom images.
You’ve probably seen one of those graphs where a thermometer gets filled in to demonstrate progress toward a goal. They are popular on fundraising sites. It’s possible to create that same kind of visual in Tableau but requires a little ingenuity.
Great! You have now hosted a successful Design Sprint session and mocked up some whiteboards everyone feels good about building. What are the steps you can now take to ensure your groundwork results in Tableau dashboards that are used by your audience?
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.