The 3D Tableau Full Monty

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The 3D Tableau Full Monty

Recently DataBlick had a client project dealing with analyzing parts on a car during manufacturing and transport, and the client wanted something like Noah's Tesla.  We all want a Tesla, right?  Well, now you can have one (in Tableau at least).  In this post, I'll walk you through how to find a 3D model and get it into Tableau.  The next post will show how to trick it out a little bit as well as "explode" parts in a 3D tool before bringing them into Tableau so you can highlight and interact with them on your dashboard.

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X, Y and a bit of Z - Cheater 3D Orthographic Views & Making everything "Spatial"

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X, Y and a bit of Z - Cheater 3D Orthographic Views & Making everything "Spatial"

Anya must have pinged me 10 times over the course of the last week asking me questions about rendering 3d cars in Tableau. I figured it must have something to do with curing malaria. My reply was a bit ironic given the fact that I’ve done my own 3d car. I did it for fun though… I don’t like being told I can’t do stuff. it just doesn’t work as part of a production workbook. Well… from a performance standpoint maybe we will get there soon. But for now my suggestion was to pick a good angle and then drive a steamroller over it and just make it into polygons. I really should have seen the next question coming, but she asked how to do that. I was stumped. My best idea was, hire a graphic artist to trace it for you…

Last night she told me she solved it using QGIS… mind explosion! Of course! Why not use mapping software for this? Geography isn’t the only thing spatial. Why shouldn’t you use QGIS to map your car, your plane, the shelves of your supermarket, what have you. I always thought background images were misplaced in Tableau, I wonder if this is what they were thinking when they put it under maps. Latitude and Longitude are just a special name for x and y (or is it the other way around?). Why not hijack Tableau’s mapping capabilities and import your polygons as custom shapes?

I’ve gone to great lengths to hack multiple layers onto maps, so I was excited to hear multi-layered maps will be coming to Tableau, but this opens the door to hacking that feature into all sorts of things. Someone once told me that everything in Tableau is a scatterplot but I’m starting to think maybe everything should be a map. Oh… I am going to crash that Beta so hard!

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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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On the topic of community: & being friends and mentors.

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On the topic of community: & being friends and mentors.

First - sign up and sign up for Emily Kunde's Mentor Match program, and have a chance to win an hour of help with either Allan or Anya as well as other prizes to be announced on Emily's site soon.  

This friendship started with a Tweet:  March 5th, 2014 Tweet to @AllanWalkerIT help…..!  ? "Since you are the king of Tableau Maps, I wanted to see if you had any suggestions?"  For over two years now, we have worked together on many collaborations.   We hope with a quick review of how we have expanded our skills by working together, you can learn from our take-aways and find friends and mentors to work with. 

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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: Faster Nested Sorts

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Tableau Padawan: Faster Nested Sorts

Tableau's sorting behavior is somewhere between "a little weird" and "WTF?!?" for those of used to the nested sorting behavior we can get in Excel and other tools. This is one case where Tableau's "mental model" of sorting doesn't match the mental model of many users, if you'd like Tableau to change this you can vote for the Independent Sorting feature request. Explaining why Tableau sorts the way it does would take a much longer post, for now, I'm going to skip the "why" for the "how" and the "what" and jump into my preferred & faster way to do nested sorting using an ad-hoc calculation.

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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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