Clearly and Simply

6 Famous Paintings in Tableau

Visualize 6 world famous paintings with Tableau Software

It has been a very long time since the last post here on Clearly and Simply: the start of a guest post series by Sheel Bhatiani about how to Expand your reach in Tableau with Parameters.

Ever since I was so snowed under with work that I wasn’t able to do the final editing and formatting of Sheel’s articles. I hope for your understanding.

I know that most of you are eagerly waiting for the guest series to be continued. Agreed, it is long overdue, but please bear with me, I can’t let this one go: Yesterday the Art Newspaper published that the earliest copy of the Mona Lisa has been found at the Prado in Madrid, Spain. Today, Darren Chalk over at The Data Studio published the first article of a series of posts about Art in Tableau.

This reminded me of publicly available data sets to visualize famous paintings like van Gogh’s Self Portrait, Botticelli's The Birth of Venus and – you guessed it – Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa.

Way back in June 2010, I already published an emulation of a piece of art using Tableau: The Tableau Replica of Curtis Steiner’s 1,000 Blocks and – although totally useless for business applications – that post was very well received by my readers.

Thus, I just can’t let this opportunity slip through my fingers and I intersperse this little article before we will continue with Sheel’s next article.

Dynamic Sorting with Tableau

How to add a dynamic, interactive sorting feature to your Tableau Dashboard. The first article of a guest post series on “Expand your reach in Tableau with Parameters”

To me, one of the most interesting sessions of this year’s Tableau Customer Conference was “Tips & Tricks from the Wild”, where five Tableau champions presented some of their best techniques in Tableau. One of these exceptional Tableau experts is Sheel Bhatiani, Lead Software Developer at Cheyne Capital. I liked his tip so much that I asked if he would be so kind to share some of his tricks here on Clearly and Simply. I am very happy to inform you that Sheel not only agreed to write one guest article here, but rather to publish a whole series of posts on how to “Expand your reach in Tableau with Parameters”. Sheel kicks off his series with today’s article. Enjoy.

Parameters - introduced with Tableau version 6 - are dynamic values that replace constants in calculations. They can be changed by the user of a dashboard or worksheet with an interactive control. This opens a lot of opportunities. Parameters in combination with Calculated Fields enable you to add a whole variety of additional interactivity to your Tableau workbook and dashboard. One of the most interesting things about Parameters is their ability to bring the existing Tableau built-features to the next level.

Today’s first article of my post series here shows the main concept of how to do this and includes a detailed tutorial how to use this for implementing a user-friendly interactive control to change the sort measure and the sort order of a view on a dashboard: Dynamic sorting with Tableau at your fingertips.

Are you ready to expand your reach in Tableau with Parameters? Here you go.

Color Coded Bar Charts with Microsoft Excel

Different techniques of how to color encode data points of a bar chart based on a second data series in Microsoft Excel

Color encoding can be a very powerful technique for data visualization. Heat Maps or Choropleth Maps are classical examples of visualizing data by color encoding.

However, you can add color encoding to almost any kind of visualization. For instance, using colors on bar charts can display additional information of the data and – if used carefully – considerably improve the significance of the visualization without requiring further real estate on a dashboard.

With Tableau Software, color encoding your charts is a piece of cake. Simply drag the dimension or measure to the color shelf and you are done. Microsoft Excel has no comparable built-in functionality. However, this doesn’t mean you can’t use color encoding in your Excel charts. Of course you can.

Today’s post describes different techniques of how to color encode Microsoft Excel bar charts, with or without using VBA. As usual, all described techniques are coming with an example workbook for free download.

Premier League Historical Statistics

Interactive Visualization of 15 years of England’s Football Premier League – a non-competitive Contribution to Tableau’s “Interactive Sports Viz Contest”

Last week, Tableau announced a new visualization contest: The Tableau Interactive Sports "Viz" Contest.

Intrigued with the very attractive prices Tableau announced, I would have loved to contribute a workbook. Unfortunately, I am not allowed to, because the contest is open to US residents only.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you may have noticed that I love using sports data for my examples. We had several visualizations (Tableau and/or Excel) of Football statistics and even one article using Baseball data:

• FIFA World Cup Statistics with Tableau
• FIFA World Cup Scorers Statistics with Tableau
• The History of FIFA World Cup Host Elections
• Football League Tables (Combine Tables and Charts on Excel Dashboards)
• MLB Salaries (An Underrated Chart Type: The Band Chart)

Since I am so into visualizing sports data, I decided to publish the workbook I would have contributed to the contest: a Tableau visualization of 15 years of historical data of the English Premier League.

Today’s article provides the workbook for direct interaction here or for download from Tableau Public. A follow-up post later this week will describe step-by-step tutorials of some of the most interesting techniques I used for the implementation.

Emulate Excel Pivot Tables with Texts in the Value Area using VBA

How to create a Microsoft Excel Pivot Table lookalike Crosstab with Texts in the Value Area using VBA

The recent post showed a way how to create a Pivot Table lookalike crosstab with texts in the value area.

However, due to the fact that it was restricted to Excel formulas, the approach came with a couple of drawbacks. Using formulas forces you to define the layout and the size of the crosstab in advance in a static structure. It goes without saying that this considerably limits the usability in real life.

Without VBA, there is no way out. However, some VBA helps to overcome almost all of the disadvantages of the formula based approach. Today’s post is the announced follow-up: it describes how to use VBA to emulate a Pivot Table lookalike crosstab with texts in the value area, as always including the Excel workbook for free download.