Clearly and Simply

Tag: page shelf

  • Animate Cumulative Data with Tableau 6

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

    © Pixel King / pixelio.deThe 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.

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  • 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:

    1,000 blocks

    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.

  • Animate cumulative data with Tableau

    Use a custom SQL data connection to animate cumulative data on the page shelf in Tableau

    The Growth of Walmart - click to enlargeInspired by Nathan's Walmart growth movie, Daniel Ferry recently had a very interesting post at his outstanding blog Excel Hero. Daniel presented a beautiful Excel implementation of animating the growth of Walmart, plotting dynamic named ranges on an XY scatter chart against a background image map of the US.

    There is nothing to add to Daniel’s great post and implementation with regards to the use of Microsoft Excel. But how about Tableau? Can you create animations like this with Tableau Software?

    At first sight this should be a piece of cake: If you think of animating data with Tableau, of course the page shelf is the first thing that comes to your mind, isn’t it? Dragging a field (the year of the opening date of the stores in our example) to the page shelf allows you to either manually navigate through all the years or to use the playback controls for a slide show. 

    However, the page shelf creates a view on the currently selected page. Thus, dragging the opening date on the page shelf would show an animation only displaying the location of the new Walmart stores in the current year. At the end of the animation, for instance, the visualization would include solely all stores opened in 2006 instead of all stores opened since 1962.

    Therefore the page shelf and Tableau’s built-in mapping functionality are only half the battle won. We need a little tweak to visualize and animate the cumulative data, i.e. all Walmart stores from the very beginning.

    Today’s post presents a way of emulating Daniel’s Excel implementation with Tableau. As always including the Tableau packaged workbook for free download.

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