All Business User Stories

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?

I was on a call with Zen Masters Steve Wexler, Jeff Shaffer, and Robert Rouse. We were talking about formatting labels, and Robert was saying, “Well, of course, you can just drag the labels around.” “Wait. What?” I said.

Is there a single “best” way to visualize data in a particular scenario and for a particular audience, or are there multiple “good enough” ways? This is going to sound strange, but I think both are right.

Tableau is a playground for creativity. When a bit of knowledge meets imagination, a Tableau Jedi is born. Understanding a couple of key facts about Level of Detail Expressions can save you hours of trying to guess Google search terms for answers to tough questions.

Just because you have geographical data, it doesn't mean you should make a map. Just because you have a date, it doesn't mean a trend line is the best thing. And just because you want to see the relationship of a part to a whole, it doesn't mean you should use a pie chart.

Big data is an interesting and quickly-evolving space. Customers appear to be mixing and matching multiple solutions based on their analytics needs instead of settling for a one-size-fits-all. I want to point out two of the trends that at first appear to be at odds. But in reality, they both point to this new, modern analytics stack that companies are adopting.

We’re thrilled to share Montclare has named Tableau as one of the top 20 SaaS companies in the world!

Do you know an exceptional Tableau user who helps others via social media? Nominate the person to be a Tableau Ambassador! Earlier this year, we launched our Tableau Ambassador program, which recognizes community members who go above and beyond the call of duty to help other Tableau users. The program began with a single branch, the Tableau Ambassadors for the Community Forums. We soon added two more branches: the Tableau Ambassadors for User Groups and the Tableau Ambassadors for Social Media. The Ambassador program now encompasses three different—but deeply-connected—areas of the Tableau community: the community forums, the user groups, and social media.

Today, we are excited to take another step in the cloud by extending our integration with Microsoft’s cloud platform with support for Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines. This is an important part of the broad integration that Tableau offers with Microsoft technologies.

Did you catch the Ask Andy Anything About Data webinar? I talked with Andy Kirk (of visualisingdata.com) about the state of data visualization, appropriate chart choices, and the etiquette of critiquing others. It was great fun and we managed to tackle ten questions in the hour. We discussed a lot of different resources which are gathered here.

Oh, the poor, maligned pie chart. The chart type that gets pushed around and bullied on the data-viz playground more than any other.

Scatter plots are my favorite visualization type, hands down. From my very first interactive data graphic about The Great One to the most recent visualization below on major league pitchers, I’ve learned a great deal from these Cartesian classics over the years. In this post I’ll show you how to make them even better than the standard ones in Tableau.