Clearly and Simply – Page 19 – Intelligent Data Analysis, Modeling, Simulation and Visualization

Clearly and Simply

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.

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October 20, 2012
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.

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September 22, 2012
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.

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September 11, 2012
Fast Choropleth Map with Enhanced Features
Enhance a detailed Choropleth Map in Microsoft Excel with additional features

The recent article Faster Choropleth Maps with Microsoft Excel provided a faster version of the VBA code to update a detailed Choropleth Map in Microsoft Excel.

Leonid Koyfman, a faithful reader of Clearly and Simply liked this article. Leonid already contributed his invaluable ideas and insights here before (Excel Multiple Value Filters with Invert Selection). He had a couple of very interesting ideas for the fast Choropleth Map and he is kind enough to share them with us:
1. Let the user filter the data by value bin and thereby highlight the bins of interest on the map
2. Show tooltips when hovering over the map to display the name of the county and the unemployment rate in percent
3. Let the user switch the level of detail: color the map by county or by state
Today’s article describes Leonid’s enhancements and includes a link to the Excel workbook for free download.

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September 8, 2012
Faster Choropleth Maps with Microsoft Excel

An improved version of a Microsoft Excel Choropleth Map with a better performance for detailed maps

Very soon after starting this blog in 2009 I published a post with a set of Microsoft Excel Choropleth Map templates. This post is still one of the most popular articles and downloads here.

A lot of related posts followed and I am feeling very honored that my blogging colleague and France’s data visualization guru Bernard Lebelle of Impact Visuel used 2 of my maps published here on Clearly and Simply in his great new book “Convaincre avec des graphiques efficaces”. Bernard was kind enough to point his readers to my blog in the book. This is much appreciated. However, he should have heaped the praise on Tushar Mehta, who invented this technique. I only “stole” Tushar’s idea.

Tushar’s approach works great and I know from comments and emails that a lot of my readers have used it with great success.

There is only one minor drawback with Tushar’s approach: the performance decreases considerably when using it on a map with a lot of shapes, like the US by Counties.

Today’s post tries to heal this. It discusses how to considerably improve the performance of a detailed map. The article describes the original approach, the optimization potential, the improved implementation and – as always – provides the Excel workbook for free download.

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September 4, 2012