All Business User Stories

As I read On Writing Well by the late William Zinsser, it struck me that his advice for communicating well with words applies directly to the craft of communicating visually with data. His seven principles in Part I—the transaction, simplicity, clutter, style, the audience, words, and usage—could be written about visualizing data as well.

Throughout May, we’ve been analysing how the media used Twitter in the UK general election. I’m going to do a series of posts on my favourite charts from the project, explaining why they were useful and how they show data in unusual ways.

Here in the United Kingdom where I work, we’re counting down until the general election on May 8. It’s a fascinating election as our nation comes to grips with coalition politics. The extent to which the media controls the outcomes of elections is important and yet hard to quantify. This has become harder since the advent of social media. This year’s event is being called the social media election, and diverse organisations such as the BBC and Buzzfeed will be covering it using their own distinct styles. What does the data tell us?

Tableau Online is excited to be the first member of the Tableau family to release the new and improved 9.0 Server experience to our customers. The new user interface is cleaner, more modern, and even easier to use than before. Everyone involved in beta testing has gotten a sneak peek, but we thought it was time for our entire Tableau Online community to be in the know.

This post will continue to look at examples of typical analytic questions that all share the common property of requiring us to aggregate data on different levels than the main focus of the visualization, such as the following: What is the largest deal closed per salesperson, and the average of these deals per country? What is the cumulative number of customers acquired per day by market? What is the difference in year to date profit of this year versus last year, relative to the last day the data was refreshed?

Following Tableau's position in the 2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant we decided to compile a list of real-world #outlier visualizations, from sports, nature, food and more.

Continue discussing Level of Detail (LOD) Expressions. Since it is often easiest to learn through examples, we will showcase some common analytical questions that LOD Expressions solve elegantly. We will start with simple examples and get progressively more complex throughout the series.

Bill Inmon is known by many as the Father of Data Warehousing. He pioneered the concept with his 1992 book 'Building the Data Warehouse' and later went on to do research in unstructured data. In 2003, he founded Forest Rim Technology, which builds databases out of textual data. David Baudrez is the Head of Business Insight for Cisco Commercial in EMEA. A global IT leader, Cisco provides products and services that help people communicate all around the world. Samit Yadav is the Senior Technology and Operations Director at PharmaSecure, a software and technology company that's working towards improving global public health. Bill, David, and Samit are all Tableau customers who we recently got to interview. We enjoyed hearing what they're doing with data and technology, and are excited to share their stories with you!

5 chart types you may have never used that add flair to any dashboard.

Over the past month, we've had the time of our lives interviewing Santa about how he uses Tableau. Last week, he shared his naughty-or-nice dashboard. And the week before, he told us how he monitors toy quality around the world. Now, as he enters crunch time for big day, Santa is prepared to share his third and final dashboard. And this one could be the most important of all. After all, what's the single most important part of his global operation? Being able to travel the world in a single night.

"We have more time to do what IT does best," says Rob Villareal, Business Intelligence Competency Lead at World Wide Technology (WWT). WWT is a global provider of systems integration technology and services and supply chain solutions—and they've implemented Tableau across multiple departments. We spoke with Rob, as well as with Operations Manager Lance Leonard, about the impact they've seen across the organization. As Rob puts it, "Every department is interacting with Tableau. We've been rolling it out to one vertical at a time, but at this point everybody is involved in some form or another.” And he's seen "a huge appetite for data." Perhaps most surprising, however, is the effect this has had on IT. In the interview, Rob shares how IT gained greater insight into the way people are accessing data across the organization. Rather than fostering an environment of “shadow systems,” their Server implementation has empowered greater alignment and visibility. And IT and business both love that.

In case you missed it, last week Santa revealed that he uses Tableau to manage his global operations. And for every week in December, he'll share a new dashboard that looks at one area of his business. In response to Santa's statements, we received a number of questions—including how Santa uses Tableau to determine who gets a lump of coal. This week, we're excited to share one of Santa's most important dashboards: His naughty-and-nice list.