Blog

Late last year I started to actively help out on the Tableau Forums. What a great decision! I’d forgotten how much fun it could be to (1) pick up a discrete challenge; (2) help others out; and (3) learn so much more in the process. One of the questions I recently chipped in on was about circular references in a sequential calculation. The background to the question is really interesting and I ended up spending a few hours digging into epidemiological models, but that’s a different story! Whilst trying to help I took a fresh look at the PREVIOUS_VALUE function in Tableau. I have to admit, prior to this I had thought that PREVIOUS_VALUE(x) was just the same as LOOKUP(x,-1) … turns out that isn’t the case! ...

An interesting and deceptively simple data set on alcohol consumption by country for 2019 week 26. I like the simplicity of the table of data and the factors affecting the top 25 that are discussed in the article. The chart itself would be better as bars not columns in my opinion, allowing the country names to be laid out for easier reading. As Eva noted in her submission showing liters of pure alcohol consumed per capita per year isn’t that easy to relate to. Digging into the definitions for standard drinks / units I was surprised to find that there is quite a range, and that some countries still don’t define a standard drink. I decided to focus on that aspect for my makeover. ...

Andy Kriebel selected a data set about US workers paid at/below the minimum wage for those choosing to participate in week 3, 2019. The original viz highlights some of the regional differences for 2017 by showing the data geographically. I like that I can see regional differences, but I found myself wanting to see the trend over time (as it’s available in the data set) to see if the geographical trends are part of an ongoing story. ...

Makeover Monday 2019 week 1 looks at NHL attendances since the 2000-01 season. A couple of things emerge from an exploration of the data set provided: firstly there are seasons where labour disputes, or lockouts, dramatically affect attendances. Secondly some teams have different stories to the general trend. I spent most of my time exploring and presenting the lockout story, but added a team selector to allow users to explore average game attendance by team. ...

I was preparing for our company celebration of CX Day 2018 on Tuesday and was reminded of this great interview with Warren Berger on the IDEOU site. The interview drills into the power of questions, and how the right question can lead to a breakthrough and real innovation. The bit that sticks out for me is the question that led to the Polaroid instant camera: ...

Christina Gorga recently commented on Twitter that she would love the ability to copy or duplicate text boxes on Tableau dashboards. The tweet attracted favourable attention, with 44 likes. One reason the feature is seen as useful is that it could reduce the time taken to copy formatting throughout a dashboard; styling like fonts, sizes, colours, borders. How much of a pain is it to reapply these to multiple text boxes? ...

A couple of my colleagues are giving Makeover Monday a go to practice some recent Tableau Desktop training, so I’m back into it too! This week we were given a data set from Figure Eight about wearable tech products, with the challenge to makeover the charts in this article from 2014, about where we are wearing our wearable tech. ...

Where is some of the worlds priciest residential property? For week 22 of #MakeoverMonday we look at a World Economic Forum chart trying to answer that question. On first glance the chart is nice and clear, but is a tree map the right type of chart to use when we’re not looking at parts of a whole? A number of community members have suggested it is not, and for me that detail shouldn’t be left to the chart footnote just in case the chart is used in a standalone setting. The sort order of the areas isn’t super intuitive either, with the most expensive city in the top right. ...

How accurate were the Guardian Sports writers’ predictions for the 2017-18 English Premier League? According to this visualisation, which was picked for week 21 of makeover Monday, the predictions were not that great. I decided to have a play with removing inaccurate predictions; after all once you get one wrong you’ll end up with at least one other prediction wrong too right? E.g. getting first and second the wrong way around. I was intrigued to see if the Guardian had more of the sequence correct than it seemed at first glance. Arguably they did have more right – 11 was the number I got to. ...

On a recent holiday we got to go to a Cirque du Soleil show. The show was “O” and you should seriously consider checking it out if you ever get the chance. Absolutely amazing! Aside from being thoroughly entertaining, for me the show reinforced some recent experiences around innovation and creative leadership that I’d picked up from companies like Empathy Design and IDEO. ...