Clearly and Simply

Tag: tableau software

Taking up the SAP BO Dashboards Challenge

Tableau vs. SAP BO Dashboards (powered by Graphomate) – a Tableau version of Lars Schubert’s Facebook Dashboard

A couple of weeks back, my Tableau blogging colleague Ben Jones had two excellent posts over at Data Remixed on how to create a waterfall chart with Tableau: A Facebook Waterfall and How to Create a Tableau Waterfall Chart.

Ben used the Facebook financials to demonstrate the technique.

Lars Schubert, an outstanding SAP and data visualization expert (no, this is not an oxymoron, at least not in all cases), stumbled across Ben’s visualization and developed a couple of excellent ideas how to improve it. He completely revamped the dashboard using SAP Business Objects Dashboards (formerly known as Xcelsius) empowered by his own add–on called Graphomate. Earlier this week Lars published his version on the Graphomate company blog (the blog is in German).

So far, so good. However, Lars decided to use a pretty provoking title for his article: Xcelsius vs. Tableau. Being the Tableau aficionado I am and – to my knowledge – the only German native speaker blogging about Tableau so far, I felt the ball being in my court.

With today’s post I am taking up the challenge: the article discusses Lars’ great ideas for improvement (including his dashboard) and my answer to it using Tableau Software.

(more…)

April 7, 2012
Dynamic Hierarchies with Tableau

How to add dynamic, interactive hierarchies to your Tableau Dashboard

The second article of a guest post series on “Expand your Reach in Tableau with Parameters”

This is the very long expected continuation of a guest post series by Sheel Bhatiani, Lead Software Developer at Cheyne Capital. We started Sheel’s series already back in November last year, but ever since I left you waiting. Please blame it on me, it is not Sheel’s fault. It is my bad. When starting the series, I have simply bitten off more than I could chew and I didn’t find the time to do the final editing and to publish the next article.

However, better late than never. The wait is over and here is Sheel’s second post. Enjoy.

My first post Dynamic Sorting with Tableau introduced a technique to expand your reach in Tableau. One Parameter combined with one Calculated Field enables you to add an interesting additional feature to an interactive dashboard: let the user decide the sort criterion and the sort order for a selected view.

Today’s second article of my guest post series “Expand your Reach in Tableau with Parameters“ will use a similar technique for adding a similar interactive feature: let the user decide which hierarchy shall be shown in a view. Again, the post includes the background, a detailed step-by-step tutorial and the dashboard for direct interaction here or the option to download the workbook via Tableau Public.

(more…)

March 14, 2012
Create Your Own Filled Maps in Tableau

A step-by-step guide to Richard Leeke’s TabGeoHack for creating your own filled maps in Tableau Software

Way back in 2009, we had a beautiful guest post by Giedre Aleknonyte describing a workaround to generate Choropleth Maps with Tableau (using version 5.0 by the way).

Those days are over. One of the major new features of Tableau 7 is Filled Maps (or Choropleth Maps as we used to call them in all blog posts here).

Did I say those days are over? Well, not quite. While Tableau provides filled maps down to the zip code areas in the United States, the level of detail in other countries is more or less rudimentary. In Germany, for example, you can create filled maps only for the 16 states (Bundesländer). This is nowhere near sufficient to do really compelling geographical data analysis and visualization. Up to now there was no way to do anything about it.

My friend Richard Leeke recently developed a fantastic tool called TabGeoHack which allows you to import literally any geographic level of detail of any region in the world into Tableau in order to use them for visualizations using filled maps. Richard is a co-founder of Equinox Ltd, a New Zealand based IT consulting firm and if you are a long time reader of this blog, you certainly already know him from the fantastic guest post series on Site Catchment Analysis. Even if you haven’t seen those articles, you probably know him from the Tableau Forum.

Surprisingly enough, Richard made his tool generously available for free in this Tableau Viz Talk post.

Please be aware that TabGeoHack – as its name suggests – is a totally unsupported hack utility, using an open back door of Tableau. The tool is a workaround with a certainly limited lifetime. It is beyond question that Tableau will provide similar built-in functionality with one of its next versions.

Richard was kind enough to grant me a sneak preview of TabGeoHack before publishing. Although the download includes a very detailed description and instruction manual, it took me quite a while to cut my teeth on the use of TabGeoHack. That’s why I thought it would be a good idea to write a step-by-step article on how to use TabGeoHack, including an example on Tableau Public, visualizing unemployment rates in Germany, broken down by counties, on a Filled Map.

So, do you want to create your own filled map of e.g. English counties, Spanish municipalities or even the individual sales regions of your company?

Here you go.

(more…)

March 10, 2012
6 Famous Paintings in Tableau

Visualize 6 world famous paintings with Tableau Software

It has been a very long time since the last post here on Clearly and Simply: the start of a guest post series by Sheel Bhatiani about how to Expand your reach in Tableau with Parameters.

Ever since I was so snowed under with work that I wasn’t able to do the final editing and formatting of Sheel’s articles. I hope for your understanding.

I know that most of you are eagerly waiting for the guest series to be continued. Agreed, it is long overdue, but please bear with me, I can’t let this one go: Yesterday the Art Newspaper published that the earliest copy of the Mona Lisa has been found at the Prado in Madrid, Spain. Today, Darren Chalk over at The Data Studio published the first article of a series of posts about Art in Tableau.

This reminded me of publicly available data sets to visualize famous paintings like van Gogh’s Self Portrait, Botticelli's The Birth of Venus and – you guessed it – Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa.

Way back in June 2010, I already published an emulation of a piece of art using Tableau: The Tableau Replica of Curtis Steiner’s 1,000 Blocks and – although totally useless for business applications – that post was very well received by my readers.

Thus, I just can’t let this opportunity slip through my fingers and I intersperse this little article before we will continue with Sheel’s next article.

(more…)

February 2, 2012
Dynamic Sorting with Tableau

How to add a dynamic, interactive sorting feature to your Tableau Dashboard. The first article of a guest post series on “Expand your reach in Tableau with Parameters”

To me, one of the most interesting sessions of this year’s Tableau Customer Conference was “Tips & Tricks from the Wild”, where five Tableau champions presented some of their best techniques in Tableau. One of these exceptional Tableau experts is Sheel Bhatiani, Lead Software Developer at Cheyne Capital. I liked his tip so much that I asked if he would be so kind to share some of his tricks here on Clearly and Simply. I am very happy to inform you that Sheel not only agreed to write one guest article here, but rather to publish a whole series of posts on how to “Expand your reach in Tableau with Parameters”. Sheel kicks off his series with today’s article. Enjoy.

Parameters – introduced with Tableau version 6 – are dynamic values that replace constants in calculations. They can be changed by the user of a dashboard or worksheet with an interactive control. This opens a lot of opportunities. Parameters in combination with Calculated Fields enable you to add a whole variety of additional interactivity to your Tableau workbook and dashboard. One of the most interesting things about Parameters is their ability to bring the existing Tableau built-features to the next level.

Today’s first article of my post series here shows the main concept of how to do this and includes a detailed tutorial how to use this for implementing a user-friendly interactive control to change the sort measure and the sort order of a view on a dashboard: Dynamic sorting with Tableau at your fingertips.

Are you ready to expand your reach in Tableau with Parameters? Here you go.

(more…)

November 12, 2011