All Visualizations Stories

Happy holidays! 'Tis the season to be jolly. To help you all get into the festive mood, we'd like to share three Tableau-made holiday calendars.

Scribbling is especially valuable when it comes to data analysis. Simply put, the goal of analyzing data is to find insights and communicate them in an optimal, engaging way. But you don’t reach this goal by first deciding which chart types you want and then adding the data. Saying something like “I will start with a bar chart” and adding data to it is the equivalent of trying to create a masterpiece with a paint-by-numbers set.

From the US presidential election to Harry Potter spells, to the lives of taxi drivers, you, our brilliant community, have created many great vizzes exploring a variety of topics in recent months. Here are just five standouts from our Viz of the Day feed.

Let’s say sales are down, costs are high, and resources are underused—all familiar scenarios, right? Being able to identify these problems is the easy part. The hard but crucial part is actually getting to the root cause of a problem so you can take action. How do you do that? By asking why, and then asking it again.

Pace charts are an alternative bullet graph design that normalize progress to goal visualizations across KPIs, even if the KPIs have different data formats, scales, and/or seasonal trends. They are useful for providing an apples-to-apples, pace-to-goal comparison in businesses that have KPIs that span different categories such as revenue, social media followers, attendance, etc.

Elections are exciting times for the data visualization and data journalism field. The innovations in each election cycle set the trend for the future of the field.

A lot of my previous work has been centered around custom maps or mapping techniques within Tableau. I've always been fascinated with FiveThirtyEight's custom electoral-college cartogram used in its 2016 election forecast. This type of cartogram was created in response to critiques about the use of geographic maps to show election data. So here's how I did it in Tableau.

Tableau dumbbell charts, also known as DNA charts, are an alternative visualization choice for illustrating the change between two data points. Dumbbell charts get their slang name from their appearance, which look similar to weights, and sometimes strands of DNA, when they are in a horizontal orientation.

Years ago, one of my colleagues asked if you could eventually learn everything there was to ever know about Tableau. Naively, I said, “Yes.” But I was wrong! I learn Tableau every day.

Andy Kriebel recently posted a great tutorial on adding vertical lines to a slope graph using reference lines. This works great for slope graphs when you are comparing the same measure across dimensions, but what if you want to compare two measures across a dimension?

You've heard from the candidates—but what does the data say? Join us as we explore the data stories behind the US elections.

I never was very excited about working with data until after graduation. That’s when I learned what a joy it is to visualize my own data. I loved the idea of telling visual stories with data I actually cared about. I could finally see how data applied to my own life! I wish I’d known this back in college. So I thought I’d share six data visualizations I wish I had during my college years.