Clearly and Simply

Build Network Graphs in Tableau

Visualize Relationships, Connections and Associations in Networks with Tableau Software

Clearly and Simply proudly presents a new guest article: Michael Martin of Business Information Arts, Tableau Partner, Tableau Certified Consultant and leader of the Toronto Tableau User Group shows us how to visualize Network Graphs using Tableau Software. Enjoy.

Network Graphs can help us see and measure relationships and connections between people, places, and things over time. This can be expressed as identifying, measuring and understanding process flows, the mix of products in shopping carts, social network and email traffic, affinities and interests people share (or don’t share), and the “hierarchies of influence” in business and / or social systems by identifying who or what triggers events, and the impacts they have on others.

Today’s post describes how you can build Network Graphs using Tableau Software versions 6 or 7, including a detailed how-to tutorial and some information on the background of Network Theory.

Tableau Quick Tip #4 – Drop Lines

Call out positions of selected data points in your Tableau view using Drop Lines

I am barely using gridlines on my charts. In fact I didn’t even know that Tableau Software has an option to show and format gridlines. Hence I started the original introduction to this post as follows:

Unlike Microsoft Excel, Tableau Software does not provide an option to display gridlines on charts. Tableau allows you to define so called row and column dividers, but only for categorical data, i.e. dimensions.

This statement is totally wrong: Tableau offers gridlines (Format | Lines | Grid Lines) and Rich was kind enough to correct this in the first comment to this post. Thanks Rich. My fault. I apologize for the confusion.

But still: gridlines are very often nothing else than chart junk as Stephen Few points out in this excellent article: Grid Lines in Graphs are Rarely Useful. Tableau has something way more useful than gridlines: the interactive Drop Line.

Today’s short Tableau Quick Tip #4 introduces this extremely helpful interactive feature of Tableau.

O'zapft is!

The Development of the Beer Prices at the Oktoberfest – a Tableau Visualization and Analysis

At this moment Munich’s mayor Christian Ude opens the 179th Oktoberfest in Munich with the traditional shout “O'zapft is” after tapping the first barrel of beer.

Prior to every Oktoberfest we have a reoccurring heated discussion on the beer price. And - except for the breweries and the tent hosts – we all agree that this year’s “drastic” rise of the beer price is inacceptable.

No one really takes this discussion too seriously, but we are having it every year.

So, today’s opening of the Oktoberfest is a good opportunity to have a closer look at the prices and the price development of beer at the Oktoberfest. This article provides an interactive Tableau visualization (beer prices since 2002), followed by an analysis of the price trend since 1952.

Web Page Objects on Tableau Dashboards

Spice up your Tableau dashboard with a web page object showing additional web-based or other external information at your user’s fingertips

Tableau dashboards and all their built–in interactive features are a piece of art on their own.

However, in certain circumstances (i.e. if your data and visualization is suitable), you can even top this by embedding a web page object into your dashboard and a URL action to hyperlink to additional web–based information outside of your data source, depending on your data and on the user’s selection.

Google Map views of your geographical data, additional product information from the Internet, websites of other companies, content from your company’s Intranet or even folders and files stored on a file server.

Today’s post is a step-by-step tutorial how to embed web pages into your Tableau dashboard and update the views depending on user inputs. Furthermore the article includes a couple of real life examples and a discussion of the pros and cons of using this technique.

Embed and Open Tableau Workbooks in PowerPoint

A follow up post: how to embed a Tableau Packaged Workbook in PowerPoint and open it directly within the Slide Show

Yesterday’s post Embed Tableau Visualizations in PowerPoint described three stand-alone alternatives (i.e. without the use of an add-in) to Andy Kriebel’s great post on how to embed a Tableau dashboard in PowerPoint.

Both Andy and I used the word “embed” in the titles of our posts. Truth be told, this is a little exaggeration. Using a web browser control object navigating to a Tableau workbook stored on a server like Tableau Public is not really embedding the workbook. The main disadvantage of those approaches is the fact that you can interact with the Tableau dashboards, but you are not able to edit the workbook. Let’s assume you are receiving a question during your presentation which cannot be answered with your existing views and dashboards: You are not able to add another sheet and do some extra data analysis and new visualizations on the fly. In other words, you are losing one of Tableau’s greatest advantages: rapid fire data analysis and Business Intelligence.

Of course you can physically embed the Tableau workbook in your PowerPoint presentation as an object like you can do with any other file of any other application. However, there is one main pitfall: PowerPoint does not allow you to open an embedded object during the slide show. You always have to interrupt the presentation, go back to the normal view in PowerPoint and open the file from there. Honestly, this is not much better than simply opening the file from the Windows explorer and it is far from being a seamless experience for the audience of your presentation.

So, here is today’s challenge: embed a full packaged workbook into PowerPoint and provide a way to open it directly during the slide show.