All Stories

When I first got a Fitbit, it was amazing. My daily dashboard, focusing mostly on a 10,000-step target, was incredibly motivating. Was I hitting the target? Answer: sometimes. Connecting with friends added great gamification. I began making different choices in my daily routine to take more steps. When I lost my first tracker, Fitbit sent me a free replacement. Wow! What more could I ask from this dream company? Over time, however, I stopped going back to the dashboard as often.

Blank stares, then...huh? That's what I get when I say "visual analysis." People tend to think I'm talking about making a chart. I am, but more than that, I'm talking about exploring data visually with Tableau.

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.

So you have your focus and your orientation. Now it’s time to design your mobile dashboard. Keep your dashboard design simple and targeted. Follow these tips to design a new dashboard or transform an existing dashboard for the small screen.

In 2015, we saw tremendous growth in cloud technology. Enterprise giants became cloud-relevant, and startups everywhere crowded into the party. Cloud data gained recognition as efficient and cost-effective, and industry players raced to capitalize on a widespread shift to cloud.

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.

Now that you’ve picked the metrics to include in your mobile dashboard, it’s time to decide whether to go vertical or horizontal. It’s important to make this decision before you start building your dashboard or transforming an existing one. Why? The answer is simple: screen size. Because the phone screen is very small, the orientation you choose will impact many steps, from your analysis to the layout of your views. Below are some tips to get you started.

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.