All Analyst Stories

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.

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.

Data doesn’t always come ready for analysis. As many of you have experienced, some data needs a lot of work before it can be sanely analyzed. The good news: Tableau 9.3 (currently in beta) offers a quick fix to that problem.

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.

We’ve sure been having a geeky month here at Tableau. It all started when we built a Web Data Connector (WDC) to the Star Wars API. Then, we watched as you, our downright-stellar community, put our data to work. (We couldn’t resist that pun.) The Star Wars data fever didn’t end there, though. In the nearly two weeks since Episode VII’s release, dozens of visualizations have popped up all over the web. Here are some of our favorites.

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.

Back in October, I shared the Tableau challenge workbook with fellow data explorers at the Tableau Conference, and many people asked me, “How can I make something similar?” So I thought I’d walk you through the steps. There are three major components to building a Tableau application: data, framework, and formatting.

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