Telling a Story in Tableau

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This short post is around trying to create an article like structure with in-line visualizations all within Tableau. Inspiration for this pulls from sites like 538 and polygraph as well as several authors from the Tableau Public community (like the one noted below, this recent VotD).

There have been many examples across the Tableau Public community showing the data storytelling capabilities of Tableau. These include leveraging additional JS libraries (via API/embed) like reveal.js (thank you Jeff Shaffer!), but others that caught my eye recently where examples of building out an entire story in a long form Tableau dashboard. Here is one example that Rob Radburn posted recently that got me thinking. Note: there are several others, this one by Rob is just a single recent example. 

I decided to see just how much work it is to do something like this, all within Tableau. The answer... not all that much. Like every tool, Tableau makes some hard things easy and some easy things hard. This type of visualization is a great example of the former and demonstrates the creativity that Tableau can empower it's Desktop users with. The viz story is just a simple collection of visualization sheets and text boxes, you can download the workbook to see how I went about laying out the story. The viz below is best viewed in landscape, hope you like it! 

Rose Curves in Tableau

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Rose Curves in Tableau

I love when people get creative and come up with visuals like these, if you want to see more, check out Shirley Wu’s project with Nadieh Bremer at datasketch.es for starters. Techniques like these (or using things like the rose curve) to encode data will definitely require a more engaged user base. Readers will need to take some time to understand what each rose petal/shape is and then it will take them time to compare the petals across the visual. This type of technique is probably not the best choice to visualize your data when granular differences between your marks need to be analyzed by your reader.

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#Data16 Twitter Network Project

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#Data16 Twitter Network Project

For this year’s conference I undertook a project with Keith Helfrich to harvest tweets tagged with #data16.  We collected the tweets regularly throughout the week, and updated a view of high level summaries and detailed network visualizations.  This post details some of the highs and lows that we came across, and provides access to the workbook so you can do your own analysis and review as well. Please also be sure to check out Keith’s post on the same subject here.

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Vizception: Viz in a viz & native d3.js integration on Tableau Server

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Vizception: Viz in a viz & native d3.js integration on Tableau Server

We wanted to show a real example of how to bring more to Tableau Server without additional hardware or hosting needed. That’s right, no additional server purchase requisition requests needed. There are really too many use cases to count when it comes to this, the details herein are only the tip of the iceberg.

We had a few short discussions and landed on the following example. This includes not only native d3.js integration but also an example of viz in a viz (in a viz) on Tableau Server. As a starting point, we used the twitter network graphs that Keith Helfrich and I recently shared, which were showcased on the Tableau bloglast month.

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Tableau Padawan - When the Pill You See is Not the Pill You Use

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Tableau Padawan - When the Pill You See is Not the Pill You Use

Today’s lesson is about understanding Tableau as a data driven drawing engine: change the data and we’ll change what Tableau draws. In this case we’re going to change the data to change the color. Recently I received a question where someone had created a heatmap with a diverging color palette like this (demo built using Tableau’s CoffeeChain sample data).

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A Viz of Many (Gender) Colors

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A Viz of Many (Gender) Colors

Pink is for girls and blue is for boys.  How pervasive is this association?

This viz updates live to reflect the crowd voted winning color palette choice.  Tha's right,  this is a live updating Tableau Public viz that uses data from a Google Sheet without needing a web connector!!!!  Thanks to some Allan Walker glitter (which is always black).

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The Tableau Conference Network

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The Tableau Conference Network

As I embarked on this journey a while back, I had some goals when it came to what I was looking to build. These are summarized in the below bullets.

  • Visualize Twitter network growth in detail using some form of network graph
  • Needed the network graph for each year to be comparable to one another
  • Interactivity against the network graphs was a must
  • Provide a way for the user to view the actual tweets
  • Once Keith and I decided to run parallel with our efforts, we wanted to way to “jump” from one view to the other.

The sections below detail out how I went about trying to achieve each of these goals. Don’t ask me why I gave myself so many of them.

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Concatenating Rows into String Lists in Tableau for #VisualizeNoMalaria

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Concatenating Rows into String Lists in Tableau for #VisualizeNoMalaria

As part of the Tableau Foundation/PATH/Zambia Ministry of Health #VisualizeNoMalaria project to eliminate malaria in Zambia by 2020 we had a request to build a “report” to show when health facilities have not submitted malaria incidence data so that administrators and staff can be notified in an easy-to-ready way.   element (such as all the product categories a customer has purchased), etc. Read on for how to do this yourself and learn a bit more about the different levels of detail of data that we work with in Tableau.

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Kids can help #VisualizeNoMalaria!

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Kids can help #VisualizeNoMalaria!

Hi, my name is Max. I am eleven years old and I am going into sixth grade.  I LOVE video games and Legos. Yesterday, though instead of playing Minecraft, I volunteered by tracing buildings with my Mom, to help support the fight against Malaria in Zambia.  

I did this because I like to be in the wilderness and go camping and have been bitten by mosquitos many times.  I can’t imagine getting sick or dying from just being bitten by a mosquito and don’t think any kid should worry or suffer from this.

It is really easy to help.  If you want to help too, go this link http://www.tableau.com/about/blog/2016/7/help-visualizenomalaria-56784  and follow the instructions.

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Padawan Dojo: SUMIF() in Tableau

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Padawan Dojo: SUMIF() in Tableau

Here at DataBlick we're known for doing amazing things with Tableau and teaching others. Our Padawan Dojo series is for new users (and users who help others) to learn how to do your own great things in Tableau. This lesson is about: learning an important mental model for working with Tableau, understanding when and how to do the equivalent of an Excel SUMIF() in Tableau, and finally how to validate the results.  

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Hive Plot Part Deux in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

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Hive Plot Part Deux in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

Note: This is an incremental post to the circular and hive plot network graphing post. When looking back at my network graphing post recently I remembered one piece of the Hive Plot that I wanted to crack and didn't get to in that original effort. One design element that helps distinguish the Hive Plot is the concept of splitting an interconnected axis into two to help visualize this aspect of a network. I think this helps to view the interconnectivity of an axis within the network you are visualizing. Also, with tools like Tableau, we could even allow for an expand/collapse feature on this axis.

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Jonathan Drummey joining DataBlick full time!

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Jonathan Drummey joining DataBlick full time!

Last fall, man-about-Tableau Jonathan Drummey (Tableau Zen Master , Tableau Forums Ambassador, leader of the Tableau Healthcare User Group https://community.tableau.com/groups/healthcare, Tableau blogger, etc.) started working with DataBlick part-time. He’s launched the Help Me DataBlick service and @helpmedatablick Tableau tips tweet stream and has had so much fun he’s joining DataBlick full-time! That’s right!  You can have the amazing Jonathan Drummey work on your project!  Besides project-based work Jonathan is leading our Tableau trainings, with proven, effective coursework tailored to your organizations needs. 

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Dynamic Small Multiples in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

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Dynamic Small Multiples in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

There have been a number of small multiple designs (see the list at the bottom of this post) in the past year or so and I am always a big fan of them, I figured why not take a chance at building one myself. If you have read any of my previous blogs, you may have noticed that I like the word “dynamic”, so I tried to figure out a way to incorporate a dynamic aspect into this visualization based on player data from the last six NBA seasons.

Dynamic?
One of the tricks with small multiple design is the fact that you have to lay out the graphs in a trellis panel (aka a grid). This can be accomplished by hard coding and sorting the partitioning dimension of your analysis, however, I challenged myself to calculate the location for each graph within Tableau on the fly. The reason why I wanted to do this was to be able to update, change between seasons, etc. without having to do any additional work on the trellis layout of the small multiple viz.

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Live Polar Clock in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

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Live Polar Clock in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

After taking a look at the polar clock examples in both D3 and protovis and having studied Bora Beran's great radial treemap & bar chart post it seemed very possible to do this in Tableau with just a little incremental effort. I started from Bora's workbook and went from there.

For the polar clock each radial bar needs to be based on a different unit of time. See the below graphic for how I went about laying out the radial bars and units of time for this viz (mimicking the D3 and protovis versions).

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Great Arcs in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

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Great Arcs in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

This is one of many posts on the subject of Great Arcs which ultimately lead us to the re-make of the 1983 cult classic Wargames in Tableau. I encourage you to read the whole series of posts by the wider team in addition to this one.

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