Clearly and Simply

Wordle Tag Clouds in Microsoft Excel

Create dynamic Tag Clouds in Microsoft Excel using advanced Wordle

One week back, my friend and Excel MVP Chandoo published a post to celebrate the very impressive milestone of the 10,000^th comment on his blog: 10k Comments Excel Dashboard. Who dared to think he would do this without providing a dashboard? Of course he did.

Chandoo provided a very nice dashboard showing all kinds of analysis and visualization of the comments received on his blog so far. By the way: Kudos on the marvelous success of your blog, Chandoo!

Great layout and very interesting insights on an at a glance dashboard. Chandoo also included a tag cloud showing “what do they say”. He obviously created the cloud using Wordle, but he inserted it as a static image.

This made me think. Is it possible to create tag clouds in Excel dynamically?  Yes it is.

Today’s post shows a way how to include Wordle tag clouds into your Excel workbook, dynamically based on texts in any cell ranges. As always, the article includes the Excel example workbook for free download.

Site Catchment Analysis with Tableau 6

Use Parameters and Table Calculations in Tableau 6 for a Site Catchment Analysis of Germany

For a recent post called Calculated Fields in Tableau I used a site catchment analysis of Germany to explain how to use and take advantage of Calculated Fields in Tableau. The example posted back then was produced with Tableau 5.2.

The main disadvantage of that workbook is the fact that you have to change a constant in a Calculated Field if you want to switch to another center location for the site analysis. Inconvenient and even impossible if you only have the Tableau Reader available.

With version 6, available since November 10, 2010, Tableau introduced an extremely powerful new feature: Parameters. Parameters are user-defined constants that can be used in Calculated Fields. They can be entered by the user of the workbook either on worksheets or dashboards, are valid throughout the whole workbook (e.g. they are global) and can be used in any Calculated Field. Thus, it wasn’t far to seek that with parameters Tableau 6 would easily overcome the main drawback of the Tableau 5 site analysis workbook.

Today’s post shows how to transform the site analysis workbook to Tableau 6 using parameters. As usual including the Tableau Public workbook for direct access and free download.

Animate Cumulative Data with Tableau 6

Create a motion chart and animate cumulative data using the new functionality “Show History” of Tableau 6

The article Animate cumulative data with Tableau described a workaround to visualize the history of data on the page shelf of Tableau’s version 5. The example provided in that post showed the growth of Walmart since 1962 on a map of the United States.

The workaround included a custom SQL statement in the data connection to create a second date field to be used on the page shelf.

The workaround did the job, but it came with a couple of serious disadvantages:

• SQL knowledge needed to create the Custom SQL statement
• Additional time needed to set up the data connection
• Extremely slow performance: executing the SQL query after opening the workbook took between one and three minutes
• Impacts on other data analysis and visualizations due to the artificially bloated data source

As I already said at the end of the original article: A workaround. No more, no less.

All that belongs to the past. With Tableau 6 you can easily animate cumulative data on the page shelf using the new feature “Show History”. Today's post includes a how-to tutorial and the Tableau workbook for direct access here and for free download.