Clearly and Simply

Tag: tableau

  • Tableau’s Viz as Art Contest – My Entries

    A sneak preview of my entries for Tableau’s “Viz as Art” Contest

    Tableau Management Dice Art PortraitsIt is visualization contest time again over at Tableau Software. This time it is a “Vis as Art” contest.

    I have published a couple of Tableau workbooks visualizing art here on Clearly and Simply in the last few years:

    Tableau Replica of Curtis Steiner’s 1,000 Blocks

    6 Famous Paintings in Tableau

    Dice Portraits of the Tableau Management

    Since I had a little selection to pick from without much extra work, I decided to take part in the contest this time and I submitted three entries: one as it is (replica of Curtis Steiner’s 1,000 blocks), a revised and enhanced one (Tableau Management Dice Portraits) and a new one (La Linea goes Tableau).

    I have seen the great quality of the shortlisted entries and the winners of former contests. Therefore I am not pitching my hopes too high, one of my visualizations could make the cut for the 10 best entries which will be published on the Tableau Public Blog. Hence, I thought I’d share my entries with you here.

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  • String Calculations in Tableau

    Concatenation, Conversion, Analysis and Extraction –
    44 Formulas to work with Strings in Tableau’s Calculated Fields

    NY Mag Crossword - Photograper: Lori L. Stalteri (flickr.com)“String Calculations” is a somehow weird expression. Calculations on texts sounds like a contradiction in terms.

    Of course you do not really calculate strings. You manipulate and analyze them like concatenating texts, changing texts (e.g. to upper, lower or proper case), converting texts or parts of texts to numbers or dates, extracting parts or analyzing them (e.g. how many words or do they contain a number), etc.

    If you do not have the option to do this type of things directly in your database, you will use Calculated Fields in Tableau Software to get what you want from the text dimensions in your data source. That’s why I called this post String Calculations in Tableau.

    Today’s post contains a set of 44 more or less practical examples of concatenation, conversion, analysis and extraction of texts. I will not go into the basic string functions of Tableau, like LEFT, FIND, LEN, REPLACE, etc. You can easily look up how they work in the manual or read the explanations directly in the Calculated Field editor.

    I rather tried to pull together a small library of 44 more complex formulas you may find useful when you have to work with strings in Tableau, like concatenate strings and a date, convert a string to a date, reverse words in a string, extract parts of a string, remove line feeds, check if a string contains a number, count the number of words in a string and many more.

    The article lists and explains all 44 formulas. I do not delude myself into believing anyone would read today’s article from start to finish. It is more a reference type of post and this is on purpose.

    However, I recommend having a brief look inside, even if you are not looking for a certain string calculation in Tableau at the moment. I am starting the article with a little text visualization example and I am also providing a Tableau packaged workbook (on Tableau Public ) including all examples for free download at the end of the post.

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  • 99 Blog Posts and 1000 Comments

    A Celebration Post: Looking back at 99 Blog Posts and 1,000 Comments since this Blog started

    100 fotos de My Buffo - Photographer: Julio César Cerletti García (flickr.com)This will be an unusual post.

    Not only that we had 99 articles since this blog started, we also received the 1,000th comment recently. I am talking about reader comments only, i.e. my replies are not included in this number. A perfect coincidence for a celebration post, isn’t it?

    So, no Excel or Tableau tips and techniques today.

    Wait! Where are you headed? Hang on.

    Be assured that today’s post will not be a simple self-adulation. Well, at least not only. It will – of course – provide some hopefully interesting data analyses and data visualizations, too.

    Now, starting point was the question what to analyze and visualize in this celebration post. My first idea was showing some web analytics dashboards. However, I decided to refrain from that because those numbers are embarrassingly low. Instead, today’s dashboards will focus on the content of this blog: both the articles and the comments. And while we’re on it, we will also have a look on my performance: again regarding the posts and the comments.

    So please have a look inside. The visualizations are a mixture of “sitemap-like” views (allowing to browse and access all content and comments) and some performance analytics. The dashboards are provided online via Tableau Public, so you you can explore them directly here in your browser, even if you don’t have Tableau installed.

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  • Bruce Springsteen Discography – An Infographic

    A Tableau Infographic – The Discography of Bruce Springsteen’s Studio Albums

    Bruce Springsteen live in Munich 2009 - Photographer: Lord_Henry (flickr.com)After six months without any new blog posts (please accept my apologies) I felt totally out of practice. Hence, I thought starting with a fun post and an infographic would make my comeback to blogging easier than an article on a more serious data analysis or data visualization topic.

    4 weeks ago I received an email from a guy (pen name: Chorizo Garbanzo) who runs together with 2 friends a music blog and podcast called Trust The Wizards.

    Chorizo stumbled across a post I have written back in November 2010: Wordle Tag Clouds in Microsoft Excel, where I used the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen songs to demonstrate how to embed Wordle in a Microsoft Excel workbook. Chorizo took the lyrics out of this workbook and created a blog post showing screenshots of Wordle Clouds for a selection of Springsteen albums: Trust The Wizards – Bruce Springsteen Lyric Art.

    Chorizo’s post and the fact that Tableau Software included Word Clouds in version 8 gave me the idea for today’s article: I completed the lyrics in my Excel workbook, added some additional information on the albums and created an interactive infographic on Bruce Springsteen’s Discography (studio albums only) in Tableau 8.

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  • O’zapft is!

    The Development of the Beer Prices at the Oktoberfest – a Tableau Visualization and Analysis

    Oktoberfest Impressionen - Photographer: sanfamedia.com (flickr.com)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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