Tools From the Pros: A Tableau Superstar

If you spend any amount of time on our forums, you've no doubt run into Tableau answer-man extraodinaire, Joe Mako. He answers so many questions and uses Tableau so much, we wonder if he knows it better than we do. It's appropriate then, that in their Tools from the Pros series, Enrico Bertini from Fell in Love with Data would interview him about Tableau.

If you spend any amount of time on our forums, you've no doubt run into Tableau answer-man extraodinaire, Joe Mako. He answers so many questions and uses Tableau so much, we wonder if he knows it better than we do. It's appropriate then, that in their Tools from the Pros series, Enrico Bertini from Fell in Love with Data would interview him about Tableau.

We're firm believers in building a community of data enthusiasts that not only shares interesting visualizations, but helps each other make their data visions into realities. And they love him for it.


Joe's a great example of someone who goes out of his way to help users with their questions (even making video how-to's on his blog) and also doing some crazy things with Tableau (radial charts anyone?).

In his interview with Fell in Love with Data, Joe talks about how he came to use Tableau and which features are his favorites.

Here's a brief excerpt:

When I first saw Tableau in action, I knew it would make my job of making sense out of numbers easier because a good chart was easy to make. The first big project I used Tableau on was reporting on data quality and monitoring the cleanup of the records. With the guided analytics Tableau enables, I was able to make interactive dashboards allowing a view to see what records were wrong, why we knew they were wrong, how much revenue was lost because of the error, and then tracking what records got fixed and the increase in revenue. The project was a success, and I knew creating visualizations in Tableau was my passion. In the past three years, I’ve rarely gone a day without using their software, being a part of the Tableau user community has become a big part of my life.

You can read the full interview at Fell in Love with Data here.

We know we echo many of our users when we say, "Thanks, Joe!"