Clearly and Simply

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.

Calculated Fields in Tableau

How to create and use Calculated Fields in Tableau Software, illustrated with a show case of a site analysis for Germany

As soon as your data analyses and visualizations with Tableau Software become more complex, you will soon find that sometimes your data source does not include all the measures and dimensions you need.

One of the most common examples is a data set including the measures revenues and costs, but lacking a profit field.

This is where Tableau’s Calculated Fields come into play. This functionality enables you to add new fields based on dimensions and measures from your data source and/or based on other Calculated Fields.

If you are interested in professional data analysis and visualizations using Tableau Software, you definitely won’t get out of using Calculated Fields sooner or later.

Today’s post discusses the power of Tableau’s Calculated Fields, including a definition, a short how-to tutorial and a few additional tips. A show case of a site analysis for Germany illustrates the use of different types of Calculated Fields including the Tableau packaged workbook for free download. 

Combine Tables and Charts on Excel Dashboards

Visualize Football League statistics on an Excel Dashboard integrating charts directly into a table

Combining tables and charts is a very powerful technique for creating Microsoft Excel dashboards. It allows you to integrate texts, values and visualizations into one table. This ensures to have the maximum of information at a glance, including a direct comparability row by row.

I already used this technique in several posts before, like the Sparklines for XL showcase or the Software Project Dashboard examples. Today’s article provides another showcase for a dashboard combining tables and charts.

Football rules the world, especially these days. We are all impatiently waiting for the FIFA World Cup in South Africa, aren’t we? My friend Chandoo recently had a very nice post on visualizing the different footballs used in the World Championships since 1930. That’s remarkable, because Chandoo lives in India and I suppose he is more interested in cricket than football. But as I said, football rules the world these days.

That’s why it somehow suggests itself to use a football-related visualization for today’s post. But I will not go for the FIFA World Cups. Not yet. Today’s article shows how to visualize national football league statistics using a dashboard that combines tables and charts. As always including the Microsoft Excel workbook for free download.

Where the rubber meets the road

A self organizing feature map for Travelling Salesman Problems implemented in Microsoft Excel

In the recent post we discussed the question whether Microsoft Excel is a viable platform for developing and testing models and algorithms for complex combinatorial optimization problems.

The Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) is probably one of the most popular challenges in combinatorial optimization and Operations Research. Why? I suppose because it is so easy to describe, but hard to solve.

There are hundreds or even thousands of different algorithms (exact solutions or heuristics) for the basic TSP or its variants. One approach is a so called self organizing feature map also known as a Kohonen Map: an artificial neural network using unsupervised learning to solve combinatorial optimization problems.

I selected this approach not only because I have done some studies on this topic back in the 1990s, but rather because both, the problem itself and the self organizing algorithm are very well fitting for an interesting visualization model that is fun to watch working.

Today’s post describes such a self organizing feature map for Travelling Salesman Problems. I will not discuss the math in detail, but rather try to explain the approach itself, the algorithm’s mode of operation and the implementation with Microsoft Excel. As always, the result (i.e. the Microsoft Excel workbook) is provided for free download.

Software Project Dashboards – Episode 3

How to create a Microsoft Excel dashboard to monitor the progress of a software development project (part 3 of 3)

This article is the last part of a 3 posts series on software development project dashboards with Microsoft Excel. Episode 1 of the series discussed a software defect statistic dashboard, Episode 2 talked about a test progress and test success dashboard. Today’s post focuses on monitoring change requests, one of the biggest threats to complex software projects.

Change requests (CR) raised already during the development of the software lead to additional time and cost needed, threaten the project plan and the budget, bear the risk of additional defects and lead to an instable baseline of the software to be tested by Quality Assurance. That’s why you should definitely keep an eye on the development of change requests throughout the development phase of your software project.

Today’s post provides a minimalist dashboard for monitoring and reporting the actual status of change requests and their development over time. As always including the Microsoft Excel workbook for free download.