All Visualizations Stories

I’ve been educated and inspired recently by the best-selling design classic The Design of Everyday Things by UX guru Don Norman.

Examine the issue of using red and green together in data visualization.

I've read a few data-viz books recently. Here are my quick reviews of Alberto Cairo's The Truthful Art, Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic's Storytelling with Data, and Isabel Meirelles's Design for Information.

Tableau has a very clean user interface which presents users with only the options that are relevant at that time. But sometimes it’s easy for us users to miss what’s staring us in the face. Here are a few of my favourite hidden tricks in Tableau.

Tableau’s mission is to help everyone see and understand their data. Keeping that premise in mind I thought I’d share what I have done in the past to make a dashboard available to a wider audience that may not speak English. I know I’ve seen great-looking dashboards which I couldn’t understand because of the language barrier.

One of the most useful lessons I've learned from the Tableau community has been on visualizing dense data in a way that quickly drives insights. Thanks to Tableau Public and its great authors, I found two solutions: by cutting and superposing areas, and by using minimalist rank position. Let me tell you about the first approa

We just released Tableau 9.3, and we’re pretty excited about the new Union feature. Union helps you combine data that’s been split into multiple files. If you work with data spread across multiple tabs or files, think of the time you’ll save on prepping your data. Once you’ve enjoyed that picture, take a moment to consider the data sources themselves. Before Union, many data sources were doomed to stay apart even though they truly belonged together. We wonder how many Romeo and Juliets there have ever been in the data world—millions, we’re betting! So we put together a handy tool to help you find the perfect match for your data source. Unencumbered by the data-prep issues of old, your data sources can now be together forever.

Ever get tired of just staring at the grey spinner on your screen, waiting for your dashboard to load? We have great news: Tableau 9.3 includes progressive-loading dashboards.

Presenting information in a visual way is not a novel concept. But best practices—such as the use of the x-axis to display a trend over time, for example—were once novel ideas. Rewind to the 18th century, and a combination of creativity, passion, and teamwork led to the birth of the x-axis.

Check out the tips, tricks, and ideas in this roundup of the best of the Tableau web for the month of February.

The Academy Awards are quickly approaching, and fans, myself included, are anxiously waiting to see who takes home an Oscar.

I often spend hours—days, sometimes—formatting a dashboard to death. The end result is mostly something I am proud of, but when I look back at some of the hoops I have jumped through, I question whether they were worth it. If something took two hours to implement and only made a tiny improvement to my dashboard, was it worth it?