Tableau Replica of Curtis Steiner’s 1,000 Blocks

Emulation of Daniel Ferry’s Celtic muse Excel workbook using Tableau Software

Daniel Ferry’s blog Excel Hero is a source of permanent inspiration for me. In a recent article called Animate cumulative data with Tableau, I described how to use a custom SQL data connection to show cumulative data using Tableau’s page shelf. This post was inspired by one of Daniel’s great articles: Excel Location Mapping.

In true tradition of stealing Daniel’s ideas, today’s short post contains another replica of one of his Excel workbooks using Tableau Software: Daniel’s implementation of the "1,000 Blocks" sculpture by Curtis Steiner (unfortunately without the soundtrack, of course…).

Here is an animation of a selection of 10 out of 78 slides:

Tableau Public does not support the slide show of pages using the playback controls. Thus, I decided not to publish on Tableau Public. Instead, here is the Tableau packaged workbook for free download:

Download 1,000 Blocks Celtic Muse (Tableau Packaged Workbook, 2640.7K)

To open this workbook you need Tableau 5.2 (14-day free trial) or the free Tableau Reader.

Last, but not least:

Daniel, many thanks again for sharing your fabulous work, for the time you took to review my Tableau workbook and for your permission to use your idea here. Special thanks go also to Daniel’s wife and daughter who helped him with the encoding of 78,000 (!) tiles. Thank you very much.