Source: USA.gov, How The Supreme Court Works, USA.gov, The Supreme Court and Federal Laws, https://www.usa.gov/supreme-court.

Brit Cava Bio

Brit Cava helps drive real-world impact at Facebook in her role on the Social Good Partnerships analytics team and is based in Silicon Valley, California. She specializes in designing visual analytics, data methodologies, and strategies that help businesses thrive and inspire action. Her visualization work and thought leadership earned earned her the title of Zen Master in 2016/2017. She devotes her free time striving for gender parity by channeling her expertise and community building skills through She Talks Data, a group she co-founded that enriches, empowers, and connects women and men in the analytics industry.

Questions

Michael: Hi Brit. Can you tell my readers what you do at Facebook?

Brit: Sure! The Social Good team at Facebook helps empower non-profits by enabling them to mobilize communities, organize events, increase fundraising and reduce costs with online tools.

As a member of the Social Good Partnerships analytics team at Facebook, my main objective is to enable the Social Good team to make effective, analytically driven, and strategic operating decisions. It’s a very cross-functional role so I interface heavily with data science, product, marketing, partner management, and business operations.

To learn more: https://donations.fb.com/

Michael: I really like your Top 100 Songs Sentiment Analysis data visualization you have out on Tableau Public. Can you talk about the process you go through to gather data, design and build a data visualization like this one?

Link: https://public.tableau.com/profile/brit4337#!/vizhome/Top100Songs-SentimentAnalysis/Top100Songs-SentimentAnalysis

Brit: Ah! I like to work smarter, not harder so anytime I can snag data from someone, leverage existing libraries, etc. I do! I’d have to thank and credit @RodyZakovich for pulling that particular data set and making it available to the Tableau community! In that particular analysis, I really wanted to learn how to use TabPy because at the time I was taking an online computer science course that taught using python. I thought it would be a great way to apply my new skill set in a tool that I was very familiar with. Thankfully, @BoraBeran has written a great user guide on Github and was actively responding to issues and even answered a few of my questions that got me through some initial hiccups. There were numerous obstacles I had to overcome from trying to figure out how to properly install additional packages in Anaconda to a lot frustration because I didn’t realize the data was returned in an array, etc.

Even though I invested a lot of energy into that viz and learning TabPy I really enjoyed the experience. In tech, there’s always something new to learn which makes it exciting yet daunting. I used to get so stressed trying to learn everything. What I learned is that if you’re forcing yourself to learn something because you feel like you have to, it will feel more like a chore and you’ll very stressed when you’re not internalizing whatever it is you’re trying to learn. The experience is so different when you genuinely feel excited about it. It’s that difference that will motivate you to solve tough problems and connect the dots!

Michael: You are one of the co-founders of #SheTalksData. Can you tell us a bit about this organization, and how people can get involved?

Brit: She Talks Data brings together women around the the world who work with data. We aspire to create a comfortable and supportive environment to drive authentic dialogue and to establish meaningful connections through small-group gatherings. Our goal is to build a community of women who can come together to grow professionally and personally. We were originally inspired by Tableau’s Data Plus Women community but our group is tool-agnostic. We host small monthly gatherings and on occasion raise money to help other women do things such as kick-start their own ideas to advance women’s’ rights or to have the opportunity to attend the Tableau Conference.

Since launching 2016, our group spread to other cities in the US! There’s a few ways you can get involved. First, if you’re interested in starting a chapter we do have a quarterly training and a tool-kit to get started. We also have a shop where you can get some awesome swag and 5% of proceeds go to support our operations! Chloe and I also co-host Tableau’s Virtual Tableau User Group where we bring together women from around the world to share their stories live so be on the lookout for those! Lastly, you can find us at the Data Plus Women event at #TC18 or join our Braindate on Tuesday at 12pm if you have any questions or want to brainstorm something!

Michael: I see that you are a Tableau Social Ambassador. Can you tell us how you became a Social Ambassador and what duties this role has?

Brit: The ambassador program’s mission is, “To recognize members of the community who connect, collaborate and share with other people because they recognize the value of helping people see and understand their data.”

As a Social Ambassador, I participate in and promote Tableau’s social media campaigns, occasionally blog for Tableau, and help welcome and support the Tableau community!

Michael: Tell us how you use Tableau at work to help your business partners explore their data and make it actionable.

Brit: What I love about my current role is that when I do use Tableau, among other tools, I’m able to quickly and easily explore my data or communicate my findings and recommendations. When I find that I’m getting many common ad-hoc analysis requests or know I can create something that will add value to our overall team mission I’ll create self-serve operational dashboards. I love being able to leverage Tableau in this way because it frees up my time to focus on research topics and meaningful data analysis to inform our team’s strategies and to support non-profits.

Michael: What is next on your “To Do” list? What can the Tableau community expect to see from you in the near future?

Brit: Something that’s been on my mind lately is how can I scale support for early-career professionals. I’m so often asked for career advice, to review visualizations or resumes, etc. and it can be overwhelming at times to keep up. I used to feel awkward about it given that I still have a lot to learn myself but I’ve realized that I do have a lot to offer on this topic.I’d love to find a way to support more people — especially those that are underrepresented — get into data analytics, thrive, and advance. Hopefully you’ll hear more from me this year on that front!

Tableau Public Link: https://public.tableau.com/profile/brit4337#!/

Source: Creech, Chad, Columbus Day: History and Flags, All Star Flags, https://www.allstarflags.com/facts/columbus-day-history-and-flags/

Columbus Day:  History and Flags

All Star Flags takes a look at the history behind Columbus Day, the present day controversy surrounding the holiday and the flags associated with Christopher Columbus and his famous expeditions.

Columbus Day:  The Holiday

Columbus Day celebrates the anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Americas on October 12, 1492.  His fleet of three ships, the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria (the validity of these famous ship’s names are widely disputed among historians) completed their two-month voyage trying to chart a western sea route to China and India when they landed in the Bahamas.  They later spotted Cuba (which they thought was mainland China) and finally Hispaniola (which they believed to be Japan).  It was in Hispaniola where he established the first small colony in the new western land.  Columbus, while widely celebrated as the founder of America, never actually reached North America in his exploration and mostly spent his time in the Caribbean Islands, and the Central and South America coasts.

Columbus Day was made an official holiday in 1937 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.  It is celebrated each year on the second Monday of October.  Variations of the holiday date back as far as the late 1700’s.  Most of the early celebrations were created by Catholic and Italian communities who celebrated Columbus’ accomplishments with pride.  However, there has also been opposition to the holiday.  Columbus Day first faced controversy from those who rebelled against the holiday due to its association with Catholicism.  In later years, many Native Americans have disagreed with the celebration of a man who is believed to have been a barbaric ruler in Hispaniola, who tortured the indigenous people and made them into slaves.  Several states have replaced Columbus Day with alternative methods of remembrance.  Alabama celebrates a combination of Columbus Day and American Indian Heritage Day.  Hawaii calls the holiday Discovery Day, and Indigenous People’s Day is celebrated in Berkeley, California.  In South Dakota, Native Americans’ Day is celebrated.  Columbus Day is not recognized as a holiday in Nevada.  Other countries have alternate names for Columbus Day as well.  In the Bahamas, it is referred to as Discovery Day and Día de la Hispanidad and Fiesta Nacional in Spain.

Columbus Day:  The Flags

Columbus flew two flags on his initial voyage.  He flew the Lions and Castles Flag (the Royal Standard of Spain, Castile, and León).  The flag’s design is based off the Coat of Arms of Castile and León but without the shield and crown.  This flag is made of four alternating quadrants.  Quadrants one and four have red backgrounds with Spanish castles having three crenellations and three windows.  The second and third quadrants have white backgrounds with a red colored rampant lion wearing a crown.

The other flag flown by the fleet of ships is now known as the Columbus Flag.  He wrote in his logbook in 1492 that we would carry a second flag to go with the Royal Standard and that flag would be selected by his two captains.  The Columbus Flag has a white field with a green Maltese cross in the center.  On either side of the cross were a green F and a green Y.  These letters paid homage to King Fernando of Aragon and Sicily and Ysabel, queen of Castile and Leon.  Above both the F and the Y were two golden open crowns.

Some other flags that are often flown in celebration of Columbus Day are:

Italy Flag – Honoring Columbus’ Italian heritage

Spain Flag – Honoring Columbus’ Spanish heritage

Papal Flag – Honoring Columbus’ Catholic heritage

Interested in Flags?

All Star Flags has your favorite flag, with the largest assortment of Historical Flag and American Flags, as well as state, military, religious, and message flags, and so much more! They even have you covered with flagpoles and accessories. Fly your flag proudly today with the help of All Star Flags.  All Star Flags, Quality in Every Star!

Readers:

This is a requirement we have had for a while from our internal business partners. Through some experimentation and Googling various posts and articles in the various Tableau forums and web sites, I was able to achieve adding page breaks and page numbers into a Tableau worksheet (or view) which I was able to use when I created a PDF file. In my discussion below, I will show you how I did this.

If you want a copy of the workbook I use as an example, please e-mail me at Tableau@cox.net and I will send you a copy of it.

I hope you find this example helpful.

Thanks,

Michael

Adding Page Breaks and Page Numbers in a PDF file

First, using the Sample – Superstore data source, create the following worksheet.

Notice I dropped State in the Page Shelf and I set Sales Amount to Compute Using State (see screenshot below). I also filter on the Sub-Category Bookcases.

Now, before I go on, left me first discuss what the Page Shelf does.

Page Shelf – An Introduction [1]

The Pages shelf lets you break a view into a series of pages so you can better analyze how a specific field affects the rest of the data in a view. When you place a dimension on the Pages shelf you are adding a new row for each member in the dimension. When you place a measure on the Pages shelf, Tableau automatically converts the measure into a discrete measure.

The Pages shelf creates a set of pages, with a different view on each page. Each view is based on a member of the field you placed on the Pages shelf. You can easily flip through the views and compare them on a common axis, using the controls that get added to the view when you move a field to the Pages shelf. For example, the view below shows the Profit vs. Sales by Region for each day throughout the month. The image below shows days 1, 2, 3, and 4. You would have to scroll down to see other days in the month.

To make this view more user-friendly, move DAY(Order Date) to the Pages shelf and use the associated control to flip through the pages (one for each day). You can quickly discover hidden insights. In this example, it is interesting that the 19th is an especially big day in terms of sales and profit in the Western region.

When you add a field to the Pages shelf, a page control is automatically added to the right of your view.

Use this control to navigate through the pages. There are three ways to navigate through the pages in a view:

• Jump to a specific page
• Manually advance through the pages
• Automatically advance through pages

Jump to a specific page

Select the member or value you want to view from the drop-down list to display a specific page.

Manually advance through the pages

You can manually advance through the sequence of pages by doing any of the following:

• Use the forward and back buttons on either side of the drop-down list to navigate through the pages one at a time.
• Use the Page Slider to quickly scroll forward and backward in the sequence of pages.
• Use any of the following keyboard shortcuts to scroll forward and backward in the sequence of pages.
  

  F4	Starts and stops forward playback
  SHIFT + F4	Starts and stops backward playback
  CTRL + .	Skip forward one page
  CTRL + ,	Skip backward one page

  On a Mac, these are the equivalent keyboard shortcuts.

  F4	Starts and stops forward playback
  Shift-F4	Starts and stops backward playback
  Command-period	Skip forward one page
  Command-comma	Skip backward one page

Automatically advance through pages (Tableau Desktop only)

Use the playback controls to watch a slide show of the pages in the view. You can play forward or backward, and stop the playback at any time. You can control the speed of playback with the speed controls in the bottom right corner of the control. The smallest bar indicates the slowest playback speed.

Show the Page history

Show page history using the Show History check box. With page history, marks from previous pages are shown on the current page.

In Tableau Desktop only: Open the drop-down control for history to specify what marks to show and when to show them.

The history drop-down control has the following options:

• Marks to show history for – select whether you want to show history for just selected marks, highlighted marks, marks that you’ve manually selected to show history for, or all marks. To manually show history for marks, right-click (control-click on Mac) the mark in the view and select an option on the Page History menu.
• Length – select the number of pages to show in the history.
• Show – specify whether to show the historical marks, a line tracing through the previous values (trails), or both.
• Marks – format the historical marks including the color and how much to fade them if the color is set to automatic, the marks will either use the default mark color or the color encoding on the Color shelf.
• Trails – format the lines that are drawn through the historical marks. This option is only available if Trails is selected in the Show options.

Page trails may not display if there are multiple marks per color on a page. Make sure that the level of detail for the view is less than or equal to the level of detail on the Pages shelf and on the Color target. Also, trails are only supported for discrete mark types such as squares, circles, or shapes. They are not supported when the mark type is Automatic.

Pages on dashboards (Tableau Desktop only)

When a dashboard contains multiple views that use the same field on the Pages shelf, you can control all of the views with a single page control by selecting the Synchronized option. This option is only available on the page control shown on a dashboard.

O.K., back to my example: Adding Page Name and Page Numbers

Next, I want to add the State to the top of each page in the title as well as the page numbers (see screenshot below).

If you double-click on the title, you can add the State name for that page as well as the page numbers.

Page Name is the current page’s State name.

Page Number is the current page’s page number.

Page Count is the count of the total number of pages.

Here is how I formatted the title of the worksheet I showed in the example above.

Page Setup

Now, you need to change some settings in the Page Setup. You get to the Page Setup by using the File->Page Setup… menu options.

You want to make sure Break pages on pane boundaries is checked.

You also, want to make sure the radio button for Show all pages is selected. Notice, in the screenshot below, the panel shows you how many actual pages there are going to be in your PDF file.

Print to PDF

Now, you need to set some of the settings to print the PDF file. You get to the Print to PDF by using the File->Print to PDF… menu options.

Make sure you have the radio button for Active sheet selected.

Voila!

Here are screenshots for two of the pages of the generated PDF file, Arizona and Nevada. Notice the Page Name in the title and the correct Page Number for each page. There are not pages for all 50 states since we filtered on the Sub-Category Bookcases.

Sources:

[1] –, Page Shelf, Tableau Software, Tableau Online Help, Shelves and Cards Reference, https://onlinehelp.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/buildmanual_shelves.html.

Joey Cherdarchuk Bio

Joey Cherdarchuk is a co-founder and the design lead at Darkhorse Analytics. A data visualization expert, his work has been featured in Fast Company, the Huffington Post, and the Washington Post. His Breathing City graphic was shortlisted for an Information is Beautiful award. Joey developed his design expertise after a 15-year quantitative analysis and consulting career. It is this analytical foundation that helps him create visuals that are both clear and engaging. He offers training on data visualization and his Data Looks Better Naked series is used in visualization curricula around the world.  He is a sought-after speaker and lectures on Data Visualization at the University of Alberta.

QUESTIONS

Michael: Hi Joey. Can you tell my readers what you do at Darkhorse Analytics? Also, can you tell us a bit about Darkhorse Analytics as well?

Joey: Darkhorse started out primarily focused on analytic consulting, hence the name. But we began to notice that just doing the analysis and providing the “right answer” wasn’t always enough. People needed to understand the data or the process or the answer itself better before they would act on our recommendations. Visualization was the key that unlocked that understanding for our clients and ensured our work actually had an impact.

I spearheaded our dive into visualization and how to effectively communicate with data for our analytics projects and now we create bespoke visualization tools for others to explore and communicate their own data. My current role involves designing and managing the development of these interactive tools.

Michael: I really love The Opportunity Atlas your company developed. Can you tell us a bit about The Opportunity Atlas, how your company got involved, and the process involved to create this site?

Link: https://www.opportunityatlas.org/

Joey: Thanks, we’re quite proud of the Atlas as well. We were fortunate that the incredibly smart folks at Opportunity Insights gave us the chance to work with them and their amazingly detailed data. We were among a few firms recommended to them by someone at the New York Times and, after some initial discussions on how we would approach the project, they eventually choose us to collaborate on creating this interactive.

With any project you need to start by understanding your Audience, your Purpose, and your Data.

With any project you need to start by understanding your Audience, your Purpose, and your Data. Opportunity Insights (OI) had large volumes of data in extremely fine geographic detail. They wanted to enable policy-makers and practitioners to better understand where and why opportunity exists and how to increase equality of opportunity in their own cities and towns. But they also wanted to engage the public showing them how neighborhoods can shape a child’s future economic and education success.

Finding ways to deal with mapping that volume of data and to engage and enable a couple of different audiences were the major technical and design hurdles we needed to overcome. We spent a lot of time discussing and iterating with the OI team and getting feedback from potential users to really hone in on what made sense and what was confusing, what worked and what would enable them to accomplish even more.

In the end we introduce the interactive with simple steps to find yourself in the data but created a number scrolling stories to tour people through some of the data’s findings and introduce policy-makers to some of the more powerful functionality within the tool. A number of the features stay tucked away until they are needed, keeping the interface from overwhelming first time or casual users.

It’s incredibly rewarding to work on something that doesn’t just look cool, but could actually help change lives.

Link: https://www.darkhorseanalytics.com/portfolio/breathing-city?rq=breathing

Michael: Your Breathing City data visualization was shortlisted for an Information is Beautiful Award. Can you tell us a bit about the challenges for creating this dataviz and how you were able to provide a solution?

Joey: This visual was actually inspired by a blog post from Conveyal. It showed how they were able to take block level census data for New York and distribute it into the actual building footprints which added a sense of realism to otherwise staid data. Seeing that I wanted to bring in a sense of the life and movement that happens throughout a day in Manhattan.

The first challenge, as with most projects, was finding and collecting the appropriate data. Just to recreate what Conveyal had done involved finding data on population, employment, land-use, and building footprints and writing custom scripts to combine and give precise locations to the data from these disparate sources.

However, to create the sense of the flow over a 24 hour period required that I join that data with additional information on work activity and workday hours. After finding that data I had to simulate the schedules of the 3.5 million people living and working in Manhattan which I did using MSExcel.

Then of course we have to bring that data to life. I actually found it easiest to map and chart the data with MSExcel. Taking screen grabs from the static Excel maps and charts for each of the days 24 hours, and putting them together in some photo editing software, allowed me to visualize the pulse of the city with the looping animated gif.

And finally finding the right chart to visualize the aggregate level data took some time. After trying bar charts, area charts, and line charts, I finally landed on the idea a heart-rate monitor style chart, which fit nicely with the breathing city theme.

Michael: What are some of the primary toolsets your team uses to create their data visualizations? For people just entering the data visualization profession, what toolsets do you recommend they start learning?

Joey: My go to tool is Microsoft Excel. I use it to clean data, explore data, chart data and often times design or prototype the interactives we build. But I do that because it is what I’ve spent my career using, so I can get to my results quicker due to its familiarity. I’ve also started using Figma more often as I design our tools because of its sharing and collaboration features. To build our interactives we most often use D3 for the visuals and Mapbox for more detailed mapping.

Depending on the project and who is on the team we may use Python, R, QGIS, Tableau, or something else to help us along the way. I think becoming intimately familiar with a tool is more important than which tool you choose. Intimate knowledge allows you to explore the solution space faster and wider. But if I were to start from a blank slate, I’d probably say learn R and/or Tableau for data prep and exploration, and learn D3 for creating interactive visuals.

Michael: I really love your Data Looks Better Naked videos. I have even used them as examples in some internal presentations I have done at work. Are you going to be creating more of these in the near future?

Joey: That series has been great fun to put together and use in my own teaching. There is something very satisfying and intuitive about progressively removing elements and watching things become clearer as a result.

I’m not sure if there will be more in the future. Charts, tables, and maps each have their own nuances that warranted a separate graphic. And while pie charts was entertaining, most basic chart types will follow the same guidelines as the bar chart and I’m not sure I want to introduce that repetitiveness to the series. If I ever find the right flow chart/ org chart example, I think that might make a good addition. And of course I’m open to suggestions, I’m sure others have inspiration that has passed me by.

Link: https://www.darkhorseanalytics.com/blog/data-looks-better-naked

Michael: What are five top recommendations you would give to someone who is just about to start having to create a data visualization?

Joey:

Know your data

The data may contain new insights but it may also limit what you can communicate, becoming intimately familiar with it will ensure you know its limits and its stories. Learn where it came from, how it was collected. Ask what is really being measured.

Visualize early and often

Visualization allows us to see in our data what tables of numbers and statistical figures don’t as Anscombe’s Quartet nicely illustrates. It can assist in: Identifying and addressing missing and incorrect data; exposing changes and shifts in data collection processes; spotting and understanding outliers and anomalies; and revealing patterns and trends.

Know your audience

What is their background knowledge? How interested or invested are they in the topic or the data? How familiar are they with the data? How familiar are they with the visuals you are using? What kind of context will be helpful to them? How will it be used? Understanding them will help you craft something they engage with and comprehend.

Know your purpose

What points do you want to get across? What information is most important to share? What are you looking to reveal? These questions will help ensure what you create isn’t just pretty to look at, but actually makes an impact.

Ask what can I eliminate?

Less is more. Our message is often strengthened by focusing it. Less decoration, can make something more attractive. Less information can make something have more impact. Asking, do I really need this?, does this add to the effectiveness? will hone your visuals even further.

Michael: What is next on your “To Do” list? What can the Tableau community expect to see from you in the near future?

Joey: After the big push to get the Opportunity Atlas out, I am literally going to Disneyland. It will be a nice time away with my family. After that, I’m hoping to put more time in to our blog, and we’ll see what new problems come our way from our clients.

Darkhorse Analytics Portfolio

Link: https://www.darkhorseanalytics.com/portfolio-all/

Readers:

As many of you know, I love viewing old maps. A component of this love for old maps is the love of old books about maps.

In the screenshots below, I have included some interesting maps and diagrams from the book, World Geography by John Hodgdon Bradley, which was published in 1948. This was a textbook for secondary education.

I highly encourage you to read A Note to the Teacher. Mr. Bradley was very insightful in his pointing out that viewing maps and illustrations is a far better tool to teach students about geography than simply providing statistical numbers.

I will publish some more screenshots from the second half of the book in the next week.

Enjoy!

Michael

Readers:

Here is the second part of showing you screenshots of interesting maps and diagrams from the book, World Geography by John Hodgdon Bradley, which was published in 1948. This was a textbook for secondary education.

If you love the maps and diagrams in this book, you can buy a copy of it for a couple of dollars on Amazon.

I hope you have enjoyed viewing these maps and diagrams from this book as much as I have.

Best regards,

Michael

Boy, I don’t even know where to start.

Tableau knocked the ball out of the park this morning. Tableau Prep Conductor, Tableau Data Modeler, and Ask Data, Tableau’s New Natural Language tool. Wow oh wow!

At TC18 this morning in New Orleans, Tableau Software announced a roadmap of product innovations to an excited crowd of over 17,000 customers and partners. Tableau introduced Ask Data, which leverages natural language processing to enable people to ask questions in an intuitive, conversational manner that makes it easier for far more people to engage with data and produce analytical insights. The company also announced plans to expand its platform capabilities with a new add-on product, Tableau Prep Conductor, which enables organizations to schedule and manage self-service data preparation at scale. These features, as well as a host of other exciting product innovations aimed at making analytics more accessible and more powerful, are included within the Tableau 2019.1 beta, available today.

Sign up here: http://tableau.com/coming-soon.

“Our customers want to enable more people than ever to use analytics within their organizations, and they are looking for more intuitive and natural ways to interact with data,” said Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer at Tableau. “Ask Data, our new integrated natural language capability, lowers the barrier to entry for analytics so people can ask questions in plain language and get insights faster. And with the growing volume and complexity of data, customers want to ensure that their data is always up to date and can be trusted for decision making. So, with Tableau Prep Conductor and our new data modeling capabilities, Tableau makes managing data easier than ever.”

Tableau Now Let’s You Interact With Your Data Naturally

Tableau’s new Ask Data allows your business community to ask questions in plain language and instantly get a response right in Tableau. They can simply type a question such as, “What were my sales this month?,” and Tableau will return an interactive visualization with no need to learn data dimensions, measures, or any data structure. Ask Data uses sophisticated algorithms that are driven by an understanding of the person’s intent, not keywords, which helps Tableau understand a person’s question, anticipate needs, and allow for smart visualization selection.

Fully integrated into the Tableau platform in Tableau Server and Tableau Online, Ask Data works with existing published data sources and requires no additional setup. People can start exploring data already published by simply typing their question, making analytics accessible to a broader group of people regardless of their data skills. Ask Data works with an organization’s governance requirements by leveraging existing permissions and security policies defined by IT. It is available immediately in beta for Tableau Creators and Tableau Explorers.

Bringing Scale and Visibility to the Data Preparation Process

The Tableau 2019.1 beta also introduces Tableau Prep Conductor, which enables data preparation at scale by centralizing the administration, scheduling, and monitoring of data prep flows in a reliable and scalable environment. Tableau Prep Conductor is a separately licensed add-on product to Tableau Online and Tableau Server.

This new capability builds off the success of the Tableau Prep desktop application, already in use by more than 9,000 organizations. It automates flows created in Tableau Prep to ensure that clean and analysis-ready data is always available. IT departments will also gain peace of mind with increased visibility into the health of data sources via centrally managed flows and alerts.

Tableau Prep Conductor is easy to manage because it is directly integrated with Tableau Server and Tableau Online. It uses the same user permissions, familiar administration views, and easy-to-use processes to publish, schedule, and share data in Tableau.

Making Sophisticated Analysis more Intuitive with New Data Modeling Capabilities

Tableau also showcased their upcoming data modeling capabilities, coming in Tableau Data Modeler, to help customers more easily analyze complex data without having to learn advanced database concepts or write custom SQL code. Tableau will automatically recognize data relationships stored in databases like Oracle and SQL Server, leveraging common data warehouse standards like star and snowflake schemas. Customers can also create new relationships in the data with a simple visual drag and drop experience.

With these advancements coming in 2019, Tableau will handle multiple levels of detail in a single data source, making it easy for customers to slice and dice multi-dimensional data without writing specialized calculations to control aggregations like averages and totals. And since these enhanced data sources can answer a wider variety of questions, organizations will be able to consolidate the number of distinct data sources they create and maintain.

Tableau and Amazon Web Services Help Customers Seize the Power of Cloud Analytics

Tableau announced a new initiative with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help customers move to a modern analytics platform in the cloud. The flexibility, scalability, and reliability of AWS cloud services coupled with the intuitiveness of Tableau’s visual analytics platform provides a modern approach that is both agile and secure.

Today, as part of the announcement, the company launched a new Tableau Server on AWS Healthcare Quick Start to help customers deploy more quickly with the support they need to meet HIPAA regulations. The initiative expands on the existing relationship and integrations between Tableau and AWS Services including Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and more. The companies also demonstrated a new Tableau Extension for Amazon SageMaker, which provides access to the fully managed machine learning service directly from a Tableau dashboard. Tableau and AWS will work together in the field to bring these and other joint capabilities to customers.

New Developer Program Gives Developers Unprecedented Access and Support

Tableau also announced the launch of the new Tableau Developer Program to help customers and ISV’s integrate, customize and extend the Tableau platform faster. Free of charge and open to all developers, members receive a Tableau Online development sandbox with documentation and sample code, as well as unique access to Tableau’s engineering team and a Developer Community Forum for support. With this new program, Tableau is giving more resources to developers so they can build powerful solutions for embedded analytics deployments, dashboard extensions, custom data connectors, data science platform integrations and rich automation of business workflows. For more information visit tableau.com/developer.

Forbes recently cited a Glassdoor survey that showed Tableau among the Top 10 most valuable technical skill sets.

New Entry Level Certification Program for the Next Generation of Data People

As data skills become increasingly valuable across organizations and job functions, recognized certifications can become an invaluable indicator of required skills, as well as a powerful addition to a resume. LinkedIn named data skills among 2018’s most needed job skills while Forbes recently cited a Glassdoor survey that showed Tableau among the Top 10 most valuable technical skill sets. With that in mind, Tableau’s new Desktop Specialist exam will serve as an entry-level certification that indicates mastery of basic functionality and helps data enthusiasts more easily leverage the Tableau certification portfolio. Attendees at Tableau Conference will be able to sit in on the first offering of these certification exams. And in an effort to help raise the next generation of analytics natives, Tableau will extend the new certification at a discount for students.

Learn more about the Tableau Academic program here.

We are raising a new generation of analytics natives. Everyone is learning analytics.

Below: Tableau partnered with the Government of Singapore in a national dataviz competition with students as young as 13 years old to work with data.

According to IDC, the amount of data subject to analysis will grow 50-fold in the decade ending with the year 2025.

Want to Join In?

Customers looking to trying the new features unveiled at Tableau Conference can sign up for the Tableau 2019.1 beta program at https://www.tableau.com/getbeta.

Sources:

Tableau Software, Adam Selipsky Keynote Address, Tableau Conference 2018 (TC18), New Orleans, LA, October 23, 2018.

Jensen, Daniel, Tableau Unveils Innovation Roadmap at Tableau Conference; Introduces New Way to Interact with Data Through Natural Language, Cision PR Newswire, October 23, 2018, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/tableau-unveils-innovation-roadmap-at-tableau-conference-introduces-new-way-to-interact-with-data-through-natural-language-300735937.html.

Finding Oases In Food Deserts
Corey Jones
https://public.tableau.com/profile/corey.jones#!/vizhome/FindingOasesInFoodDeserts/Dashboard1

Gender & Ethnic Disparities in Tech Companies
Ivett Alexa

The American Political Universe
Mike Cisneros
https://public.tableau.com/profile/mikevizneros#!/vizhome/PoliticalDW/TheAmericanPoliticalUniverse

State Medigap Costs – #ProjectHealthViz
Lindsay Betzendahl
https://public.tableau.com/profile/lindsay.betzendahl#!/vizhome/StateMedigapCosts-ProjectHealthViz/Medigap

US Fruit Consumption
Leigh Fonseca
https://public.tableau.com/profile/missleigh#!/vizhome/USFruitConsumption/Fruit

Explore Flight Delay & Tweet Data
Sue Grist

Total Annual Loss of Bee Colonies in the US (Part of #TC18 Viz Gallery)
Klaus Schulte
https://public.tableau.com/profile/klaus.schulte#!/vizhome/TotalAnnualLossofBeeColoniesintheUS/Dashboard1

Boeing Commercial Market Outlook 2018-2037
The Boeing Company
https://public.tableau.com/profile/theboeingcompany#!/vizhome/BoeingCommercialMarketOutlook2018-2037/CommercialMarketOutlook

ProjectHealthViz Childhood Deaths
181 views | Young Song
https://public.tableau.com/profile/young.song#!/vizhome/projecthealthviz_childhood_deaths/childhood_deaths

Ratios of Inequity
Nai Louza
https://public.tableau.com/profile/nai.louza#!/vizhome/RatiosofInequity/RatiosofInequity

Jordan Career Scoring
Jeff Plattner
https://public.tableau.com/profile/jeff.plattner4532#!/vizhome/JordanCareerScoring/PlayerViz

Baseball
Dilyana Bossenz
https://public.tableau.com/profile/dilyana2344#!/vizhome/Baseball_34/Dashboard1

Super Bowl 2018 LII | Big Game Battle
Ann Jackson

3rd place winner: DataforaCause Entry – Global Peace Scores
Valerie Mais
https://public.tableau.com/profile/valerie1556#!/vizhome/DataforaCause-GlobalPeaceScores/DASHBOARD

New York Rat Sightings
Claire Kim
https://public.tableau.com/profile/siyu.bao#!/vizhome/2018W27NewYorkRatSightings/NewYorkRatSightings

MakeOverMonday – Overtourism
Ludovic Tavernier
https://public.tableau.com/profile/ludovic.tavernier#!/vizhome/MakeOverMonday-Overtourism/Tableaudebord1

A History of the World Cup
Ken Flerlage
https://public.tableau.com/profile/ken.flerlage#!/vizhome/AHistoryoftheWorldCup/WorldCup

The Magic of New Orleans
Jeff Plattner
https://public.tableau.com/profile/user.group.viz.contest#!/vizhome/TableauTakestheBigEasy-Minneapolis/NOLA

Hottest Places in New Orleans
Tricia Duncan
https://public.tableau.com/profile/user.group.viz.contest#!/vizhome/TableauTakestheBigEasy-Minneapolis2/HottestPlacesDashboard

Exploring Restaurants in New Orleans
Jeff Park
https://public.tableau.com/profile/user.group.viz.contest#!/vizhome/TableauTakestheBigEasy-Phoenix1/NOLAViz

My partner in data crime, Claire Smith, visiting the Tableau Public Viz Gallery at TC18 in New Orleans.

Tweeted by Zach Bowders

#TC18 quote of the day

“Color is the most powerful thing you can do.

Don’t be a puking unicorn.”

Tweeted by Ankush Laxmeshwar

In New Orleans for #TC18; found this in the French Quarter! #tableau @tableau

Tweeted by Brian Mooneyham

#TC18 it’s what’s for breakfast!

Tweeted by Chloe Tseng

Hello #Datafam, I am here in #TC18 NOLA!!

Tweeted by David Pires

The moment you come close to the living dead at #TC18

Tweeted by Keely O’Neill

Finishing touches before tomorrow! Ain’t no party like an aggregator party at #tc18

Tweeted by Vince Baumel

If you’re at #DataNightOut and see my crazy blue glasses come say hi! #TC18

Tweeted by Mark Bradbourne

Below (from left): Mark Bradbourne, Kevin Flerlage, Simon Beaumont, Ken Flerlage

Tweeted by Lorna Eden

I made some glittery bow ties for the one and only @cheeky_chappie

Below: Sarah, Fi, Jeremy, James, Simon, Paul B, Sarah, Mark, David, Laura, Stephen

Tweeted by Susan Glass

So thrilled to win a t-shirt with one of my favorite vizzes from @theneilrichards at #tc18. Thank you Neil!

Tweeted by Patrick Van Der Hyde

#TC18 #ambassador puzzle #1 is done. @tableau #Tableau

Tweeted by Claire Smith

We have the BEST Stewart at hotel modern, Miss Dee @LearnVizWithMe @MauriceHarris85 She said “take a picture and put it on Twitter!” And when Miss Dee gives an order, you listen!

Tweeted by David Kelly

With @ZachBowders this is how the #tabros do #tc18. Dragon Drop style

Tweeted by Ellie Fields

Amanda gives the people what they want: vector tile maps in @tableau. #tc18

Tweeted by Vince Baumel

I mean, where do you even GET a suit like that?! Looking extra sharp @acotgreave! #TC18

Tweeted by Simon Beaumont

The only way to make up for #TC18 ending, tiki tiki juice with my #datafam before we all head out for #TCfoodies meal @BistroBywater should be a great night

Tweeted by Philip Riggs

Be sure to visit the @Tableau Public area at #tc18 to find out how to build your own Viz Gallery! @jonni_walker

Tweeted by Jordan Scott

You guys… #TC18

Greetings!

Last week, Tableau held its annual conference in New Orleans. Many new product and feature announcements were made during the conference. Boy oh boy, Tableau has some great new features coming starting next week with version 2018.3 and again in January with version 2019.1. Claire Smith and I plan on installing 2019.1 on our new sandbox server in the next few weeks so that we all can kick the tires and give it a good look.

Claire Smith Becomes A Tableau Desktop Certified Associate

While at the Tableau Conference last week in New Orleans, Claire took and passed the Tableau Desktop Associate Certification Exam. This is not just a simple exam. Tableau provides you with multiple datasets covering a variety of topics. Then, you have to sit at a computer with Tableau Desktop installed and build numerous data visualizations from scratch to answer the 50 questions on the exam. Here is an example of one of the questions.

What was the percent increase in orders for customers who placed more than 3 orders in 2013?

This is not a simple drag-and-drop problem in Tableau to solve. You need to find all customers who placed more than 3 orders in 2013. Then, you have to look at all the orders that have been placed by those customers in the following years, and then determine the percent increase.

Besides being under the stress of a time constraint of 2.5 hours, you have to solve a dozen or so of these kinds of problems and answer multiple questions for each problem. One mistake in building your workbook could mean getting an entire portion of the exam incorrect.

Congratulations to Claire for this great achievement.

Tableau Announces Major Changes to the Tableau Suite of Products

Here is a description of some of the key changes and when each change will be released.

Take note that one of the new features will be the ability to export to PowerPoint, and to hide all of the filters where you can toggle them on and off.

• Vector maps and map styles (coming in 2019) — Maps are incredibly important visual analytics tools. To offer more detail and responsiveness, Tableau is updating their background map technology to use vector tiles. Vector maps are fast and fluid, with the ability to zoom in on different areas of interest to demonstrate how smoothly map features scale—like contours and building footprints. Additional map layers, including satellite images, will bring more context to your data.

• Navigation buttons (Tableau 2018.3) — Want to offer a guided experience between dashboards, sheets, and additional resources? Dashboard buttons provide a simple way to navigate from one piece of content to the next, like switching between different sheets, so it’s easier to build dashboard applications.
• Toggle zone visibility (coming in 2019) — Speaking of hiding: Tableau’s new toggle button allows you to hide a dashboard zone until it’s needed. This is especially helpful as more filters are added to dashboards. With a button, a single click makes zones, like a series of filters, disappear or reappear. Wax on, wax off—it’s that easy.

• Export to PowerPoint (Tableau 2019.1 beta) — To support more traditional reporting use cases, Tableau is adding export to PowerPoint. In a few clicks, vizzes can be exported into a full deck. You can export to PowerPoint to quickly add static images of your vizzes to your important presentations.

Collaborate and get insights anytime, anywhere

Tableau also showed us new ways to enable secure data access—on and offline.

• Redesigned Tableau Mobile app (Tableau 2019.1 beta) — Tableau announced a totally redesigned mobile app experience! It’s more secure and easier than ever to use. Users are prompted with new biometric identification (including Touch ID or Face ID) which is easy to enable Server-wide.

A new browsing experience was added to the Explore tab, where you can access recent vizzes and explore content within projects. You can also go into airplane mode to use interactive offline previews, grabbing vizzes to scroll, highlight, and see tooltips—all without connectivity.

• Automatic phone layouts (Tableau 2019.1 beta) — To make your vizzes phone-ready from the get-go, Tableau has introduced automatic phone layouts. Using a new smart algorithm that makes the best design decisions for a mobile layout so you don’t have to. Then, you can customize the layouts if you’d like.

• Tableau Public attribution (Coming in early 2019) — Tableau heard from their Tableau Public community that they want to cite sources of inspiration for new masterpieces on Tableau Public. And now you can. The new Tableau Public attribution feature links to a source viz and its author’s profile.

 Get from secure data to analysis even faster

• Encryption at rest for extracts (coming in 2019) — Add an additional level of security with a click of a mouse. Tableau is improving data security by adding encryption at rest for extracts. Coming soon, extracts will be encrypted while they are stored on disk on Tableau Server. You can delegate the choice of encryption to data publishers or enforce encryption for all extracts across a site.

• Multiple table storage for extracts (Tableau 2018.3) — Using multiple table storage for extracts, Tableau showed us faster extract creation and viz rendering times for an impressive Van Gogh Starry Night viz (see screenshot below). When creating an extract, you can now choose to mirror the table structure of the data source within the extract, rather than storing the data as a single table within a Tableau Data Extract. With multiple table storage, Tableau only queries the tables it needs in the extract.

Extend and customize Tableau with greater flexibility

Following last week’s announcement of newly created Tableau Developer Program, Tableau shared some of the ways they are empowering their developer community.

• Webhooks (in Developer preview now) — Tableau wants to empower developers to stay on top of events in Tableau Server and Online, so they are introducing support for Webhooks! Webhooks can be used to configure server notifications to create a ticket in ServiceNow when a password change caused an extract failure. You can also generate a notification in Slack to alert your team when a new dashboard was published in one of your favorite projects. With Webhooks, the customization possibilities are endless, and you’ll never miss an event again.
• Show and hide for the Extensions API (coming in 2019) — Tableau added the ability to show and hide dashboard extensions to their extensions API. During Devs on Stage, they showed a great example of an extension that allows you to write back to an inventory management system. The write-back zone is hidden until needed, so it doesn’t take up valuable space in the dashboard.
• Extensions gallery (Tableau 2018.2) — In August, Tableau launched dashboard extensions, empowering developers to build custom applications for Tableau. Their growing Extensions Gallery is the place to find new extensions to give your dashboards superpowers. During Devs on Stage, they showed us some extensions in the works, like one that brings DataRobot machine learning models right into Tableau to help you identify key factors.

Analyze with more powerful, visual interactivity

Tableau is excited to see the creativity of the community unleashed on some new features that act as analytical building blocks, bringing interactive, visual analysis to life in new ways.

• Parameter actions (coming in 2019) — Parameter actions place a selected mark’s value into the parameter, updating any vizzes and calculations that use that parameter to drive interactive visualizations. They showed us a practical application with a time series comparison, making a year-over-year analysis simple and interactive. With a data set on smoking rates across the US, they also demonstrated how selecting a mark for the state of Alaska in 2010 adjusted the reference lines across the sparklines for every other state. Parameter actions make visual, quantitative comparison much easier and faster—and that’s just one of the many ways this new feature can be used!
• Set actions (Tableau 2018.3) — While a parameter holds a single value, sets hold multiple values. With set actions, you can change the members of a set with clicks, driving both vizzes and calculations to respond instantly with a selection. One application for this feature is proportional brushing. Another, they showed us with stock data, allows Tableau to do easy point-in-time comparisons.

With each click, the set updated and the Tableau calculation engine took care of the rest. Set actions make table calcs, reference lines, and custom SQL all interactive.

Tableau Version 2018.3 Features

Mixed Content – With Mixed Content, Tableau Server has made it easier for you to find the workbooks and data sources you need. The new experience gives you the option to see projects, workbooks, and data sources in a single list. No more having to switch between viewing Projects and Workbooks.

JDBC Driver-Based Connections – Tableau is adding support for using JDBC driver-based connections similar to the Other ODBC functionality in Tableau today.

Normalized Extracts – Normalized Extracts is a new performance feature for extracts with one or more join statements. Now, extracts can be created with a “Multiple Table” schema so that individual tables can be stored in the extract file before they are joined together.

Worksheet Transparency – Now you can enable set the background of a worksheet to transparent.

Sort Dialog Update – In Tableau 2018.3, Tableau has updated the user experience of the sort dialog to improve usability.

Rearrange Layout Button – The Rearrange Layout Button will run Tableau’s new Auto-Generated Layout algorithm and quickly optimize your custom phone layouts.

Tableau Help Updates – Tableau made some updates to the look and feel of Tableau Help, to make it easier to find what you need.

Dashboard Navigation Buttons – Add easy navigation from your dashboard to another dashboard, sheet, or story.

Density Mark Type (Heatmap) – Tableau introduces heatmaps, a powerful new mark type, to Tableau. With one click, turn millions of marks into a meaningful representation of your data. Understand where there are concentrations of points, and identify patterns in seconds—whether on a map or scatterplot.

Navigation Action – Tableau brought a new action type to Tableau. Easily add navigation between sheets with the navigation action, now available as an option in the actions dialog.

Increased Column Limit for Tables – In v2018.3, Tableau has increased the upper bound on the column limit, allowing users to create tables with up to 50 dimension columns.

Spatial Data Updates – ESRI Geodatabase, KML, and TopoJSON support. Tableau now supports new spatial file connections to ESRI File Geodatabases and TopoJSON files. Tableau updated the spatial file connector to support KML files with multiple layers.

Tableau Mobile for Citrix XenMobile and Microsoft Intune – You can now add MDM solutions Citrix XenMobile and Microsoft Intune via AppConfig for Tableau Mobile.

Tableau Mobile for Blackberry – Blackberry customers are now able to deploy a special version of Tableau Mobile that is compatible with the Blackberry Dynamics MDM platform.

Sources:

–, Tableau Conference 2018: Devs on Stage, Tableau Software, Tableau Conference 2018, New Orleans, LA, October 24, 2018.

McShane, Ryan, Spotted at #TC18 Devs on Stage: vector maps, a redesigned mobile app, parameter and set actions, and Sasquatch, Tableau Software, Tableau Community Blog, October 24, 2018, https://www.tableau.com/about/blog/2018/10/tc18-devs-stage-96448#W2osveTriZEab5mk.99.

Readers:

I have another guest post from another one of my co-workers, David Timm. David loves to learn new things and has really taken a tiger by the tail with Tableau. Using his expertise in SharePoint, David has our City business partners real excited by the reports he has been developing for them.

David Timm is a SharePoint/Web Analyst with the City of Glendale, Arizona. Besides being the City’s SME for all things SharePoint, David also has developed many Tableau reports for our City business partners using SharePoint Lists as the data source.

I think you will find David’s guest blog post extremely helpful if you use or plan to use SharePoint Lists as your data source.

Best regards,

Michael

David Timm: Using SharePoint Lists in your Tableau Dashboards (or Integrating SharePoint into your Tableau Dashboards)

SharePoint Online  – why?

One of the tools we have at our disposal in the City for collecting data is SharePoint 365 (online). Although not a perfect tool, it gives us the ability to spin up a LIST without having to create a full-on front end/back end app that lives in SQL Server (or another db). Programs like InfoPath (I know) or PowerApps let us create robust codeless forms that are simple for the user. Plus, SharePoint’s ability to version records track who created and modified records gives a pretty good safety net in terms of security and validation.

We use SharePoint to gather and house the data input by the users. Great. It works. But until recently, the only way we could report on that data was to export to Excel and then bring it into Tableau manually. Pretty ugly. Users didn’t go for it with much gusto but resigned themselves to just using Excel if they HAD to. This made it more difficult to sell users on SharePoint being a valid data collection tool. We needed some way to make reporting better.

Tableau to the rescue

Somewhere around Tableau 10.2, it was SUPPOSED to be possible to connect to SharePoint lists. I think the option was even in the menu for servers. I don’t think we had success in our world until about 10.5. Now, again, we’re in the cloud version and not on-premise PLUS, we also have a government tenant (licenses) which means we have some additional restrictions. So, no Tableau web part for us.

How do I connect to my SharePoint site?

A great article on the initial connection to SharePoint can be found here: https://onlinehelp.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/examples_sharepoint_lists.html. We use Third party SSO which didn’t require any additional set up on the Office 365 environment. Talk to your network team if you have one of the other options. Luckily there is lots of info out there.

Who should I connect as?

Connecting to a SharePoint Online site requires a user account and an Office365 license. You need to connect as a user that has access to the site/list you want to use (I’m also the SharePoint admin for all sites so that makes it easy. I can just use my credentials, connect to the site, and get whatever I want.). You might be tempted to just embed your own credentials in the connection. This. Is. A. BAD. Idea! If you were to win the lottery, get abducted by aliens, get hit by a random beer truck in the street, the minute the System Admins shut off your credentials, All those connections would fail and all the happy users of their awesome Tableau dashboards would be sad. We don’t want that. A sad user is one who is not liking Tableau. We want happy users.

A GOOD IDEA is to get your System Administrators to create a quasi-system account in Active Directory, grant that user an Office 365 license, add that user to the SharePoint site with your list with at least READ rights (I grant CONTRIBUTE just to be safe). If you want to get to different sites, I just make sure to add that user to a MEMBERS or VISITORS group and that will expose all the lists in that site or sub-site.

Great. I connected to my site. Now what?

You’ve got a user account and password created. The user has permission to the site. What’s next? Well, we then need to create a new workbook, use SharePoint List as our data source and successfully connect using the “SiteUser credentials”. Like this.

Your connection cranks away. You anxiously await to see if it’s going to resolve. Then you let out a scream of joy as you see a list of “tables” in the left area. These “tables” are actually the individual lists under our site. These behave just like a SQL or Excel or any other data source EXCEPT you can’t use custom SQL. But you CAN join multiple tables together assuming there are common fields in each.

In the screenshot below, I do just that to get some GEO data into a worksheet from a second list under the same site.  But you CAN join different data sets together also, like a GIS Shapefile or a separate Excel sheet (or anything else. Provided there are common fields between them).

Is it live or is it Memorex?

Extra points if you even know what Memorex is. A SharePoint connection yields an EXTRACT. You don’t have a choice (at least as of now). You’ll want to embed the password when you publish your data source to a server and schedule a data refresh on whatever best suits your needs. We do most of ours once a day. I wouldn’t suggest doing to it frequently just because. SharePoint is still a Microsoft product and might get moody. That being said, I’ll admit I haven’t gone more than every 4 hours. If you’re feeling brave and want to try for close to real time, go nuts.

Anything odd about the list data?

Yes. You need to break it on the SharePoint side to get the best results (with larger datasets). SharePoint lists use VIEWS to present the data to a user. You can configure that view to show selected columns, filter based on “xyz” criteria. You can have many views within a single list. On top of that, each list is limited to 5000 items/records that it will show in a single view even though a list can hold MILLIONS of records (in theory). You also have only 1 “default” list that is presented to the users when they first open the list itself.

Only 5000 records???

Now before you freak out on that limit there is good news. Even though SharePoint will throw an error if a list tries to grab more than 5000 records, Tableau doesn’t care. Yay Tableau! If I have 20,000 records in a list, I can’t view them in native SharePoint’s default list, but Tableau will grab them all on each extract. This might mean you have to educate the list users on this. Ideally, though, you’ve got them using Tableau for reporting and they won’t need to go there anyway.

Almost there. Now how do I use this data?

It’s now just data in Tableau and behaves like anything else. Basically, just go all Viz on the data like you normally would on any other data source. Add parameters, actions, make dashboards, everything.

Here is a heat map with a dual axis showing our city boundaries and the amount of work done in parks over time. Senior management loved this. I included a viz in tooltip on the heat areas to further show the data.

Any reactions from SharePoint users in this approach?

Once we got everything connected and showed examples like the above, other departments had a light bulb moment and wanted to get on board. The above map was even presented in a state-wide conference for the Parks Department. This certainly helped spread the value that Tableau can bring to the City using some of the existing tools and a little training.

Can you simplify all that?

1. Have permission to see the list you want to access (users won’t need this as Tableau permission will take over once you publish to a tableau server)
2. Create a User as a connection account in Active Directory (set password to never expire if you can get away with it)
3. Add that user to the SharePoint site with the list you’re after
4. Grant that user permission to read that list (Read permission or higher)
5. Open Tableau
6. Connect | To Server | SharePoint Lists
7. Fill out the Connection Info to the appropriate list
8. Once connected drag the Table/List to the top and join any tables together you need (optional)
9. Make worksheets and dashboards to bedazzle and wow your customers
10. Publish to a server and embed the password in the connection
11. Set up a refresh schedule for the data source

And that’s about it. With any luck, this will set you all on the path of mining your data out of SharePoint and into Tableau. I have about 6 major departments using this technique with workbooks having dozens of sheets and dashboards in them.

David Timm

Happy Halloween! Sortable.com created this nifty infographic showcasing those things we fear.

Deepak Rai Bio

Deepak is a seasoned Data Scientist with experience with working in scientific, business and statistical analysis environments. He has worked across multiple industries, and world-class research and development organizations, in India, Japan, and the USA. His emphasis has been on Predictive Modeling to provide analytical solutions for complex business and scientific data for Cost Containment, Process Improvement, and Optimization.

Note: Deepak and I worked together for many years at General Motors. He is one of the most gracious and hard-working guys I know. We worked in adjoining cubes and shared our discoveries about Tableau. It is my honor to interview him.

Questions

Michael: Hi Deepak. Can you tell my readers what you do at General Motors?

Deepak: Well, first of all, I am very much thankful to you, Michael (“Guruji”). It was you who introduced me to Tableau four years back at GM and I learned a lot from you during the sessions and the classes you taught during your stay at GM. Coming to your question, I would summarize that I use Tableau to do Complex Analytics and Visualizations for my Group at GM to enable them to drive decision making across the Organization.

Michael: Back when you and I were both at GM, you were first creating some pretty sophisticated reports In Excel and then migrated them to Tableau. Can you tell us what kinds of reports you were creating and how you migrated them over to Tableau?

Deepak: Yes, those used to be old times, but with Tableau, I was able to do that enormous amount of work much more efficiently and faster as well as was able to analyze large volumes of data which saved me a lot of time and efforts.

Michael: I see that you are a Data Monarch (62,364 points) on the Tableau Community Forum. Can you tell my readers how you achieved such a distinguished status?

Deepak: I started exploring the Tableau Community Forums about 3 years back when I was looking for some help on some issues and to my surprise, there were plenty of resources and the help available from individual contributors and I got many of my answers in the Community itself. That prompted me to give back to the Community, as well as to enhance my knowledge and learn from stalwarts in the community. I started contributing, particularly as I have tremendous experience working with scientific and statistical data so I can contribute a lot to complex calculations and statistics. The rest is history. I rose to the status of Data Monarch in a few months and this year was designated as Tableau Ambassador for Community Forums.

Link: https://community.tableau.com/people/deepak.rai.0

Michael: You were selected as a Tableau Ambassador earlier this year. Can you tell us how you became a Tableau Ambassador and what duties this role has?

Deepak: Tableau selects the Ambassadors annually through open public nominations and this year 564 names were submitted for nomination across the industry from all corners of the World. Sixteen people were selected as Tableau Ambassadors in four distinct branches: Social Media, Tableau User Groups, Community Forums, and Tableau Public.  I was selected as Ambassador for Tableau Community Forums. Basically, Ambassadors represent the spirit and voice of the community, teach and share, while fostering positive and supportive behavior within the community. They give credit where credit is due and help nurture inclusivity. They shine the spotlight on new voices, innovative ideas, and help Tableau team to reach more people to help them see and understand their data.

Michael: Can you tell us three of your favorite Tableau Desktop tips and tricks?

Deepak: Hmmm…There might be many of my favorites and it is difficult to say that as Tableau is such a vast software application as well as it keeps on expanding every day. However, I love working with Level of Detail (LOD) Calculations because I feel that it gives you more options and freedom to analyze data as well as it saves you from the hassle of setting up table calculations and so they are very powerful.

Then, I like working with Complex Datasets and Join Calculations, Self-Union, Self-Join, Particularly Cartesian Joins as well as Forecasting. The other areas of interest include using Python and R with Tableau for creating Visualizations and Drive Decision Making.

Michael: Now that you have attended TC18 last week in New Orleans, can you tell us your three favorite things you learned there?

Deepak: It was my first Tableau Conference and it was a great learning experience. Particularly, I am immensely impressed with the Dashboards Extensions and I feel that since now and Next Tableau Conference in Las Vegas, I envision tremendous growth in Dashboard Extensions as Tableau invites independent developers to develop whatever extension they can. Besides them, Set Actions, Transparent Vizzes, Transparent Zones, Heat Maps, Dashboard Navigation Buttons, Vector Map Tiles, Map and Layer Styles such as Satellite Views, Automatic Phone Layout, Automatic Data modeling, Multiple Table Extracts, Filtered Nested Sorting, Parameter Actions, and many Others drew my attention.

My future would include having a shot at all these new features and help others as much as I can because I try to learn something new every day.

Source: Janise, Hope, INTERACTIVE INFOGRAPHIC: Traditions and significance of Diwali, University of Houston- Clear Lake, November 6, 2018, https://uhclthesignal.com/wordpress/2018/11/05/interactive-infographic-traditions-and-significance-of-diwali/.

Source: Mullen, Arthur and Andrew Koper, Historic Detroit Neighborhoods, Cityscape Detroit, August 8, 2003, https://web.archive.org/web/20071010073930/http://www.cityscapedetroit.org:80/Detroit_neighborhoods.html#

HISTORIC DETROIT NEIGHBORHOODS

Detroit is composed of many neighborhoods, each with a unique history and features. Not many people are aware of them all or where they are located. Cityscape Detroit has created this map.

Arthur Mullen researched this information. Andrew Koper published it to the web. Click here to go to the Cityscape web site. If one of the neighborhood names below is a hyperlink, you can click on it to get a short description of the neighborhood.

DONATE

Click on the link below to go to a secure PayPal page to make a donation to Cityscape Detroit! They are an all-volunteer, non-profit group and do everything they can to minimize expenses, but every bit of money counts.

http://www.cityscapedetroit.org:80/donate.php

Readers:

Well, for better or worse, the 2018 midterm elections are over. A lot of discussion surrounding the blue wave entering the election and the Democrats will have reason to be optimistic. They increased their support in large areas of the Midwest and the Rust Belt, regions where President Donald Trump dominated in 2016, most notably in Oklahoma’s fifth district and Kansas’s third, where they flipped control.

The Guardian had some great visuals today analyzing the midterm election. The one that really caught my eye was the map with scaled, angled arrows to show the Republican and Democrat swings in these midterms for the House compared against those of 2016. For now, I am calling this the Shifting Arrow Map.

NOTE: Blank counties either have no results at the time of The Guardian publishing this article or had an uncontested House race in 2016 or 2018.

Enjoy analyzing the results, whichever side of the fence you are on.

Michael

Source: Josh Holder, Cath Levett, Daniel Levitt and Peter Andringa, Blue wave or blue ripple? A visual guide to the Democrats’ gains in the midterms, The Guardian, Wednesday, November 7, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2018/nov/07/blue-wave-or-blue-ripple-a-visual-guide-to-the-democrats-gains.

Readers:

Some of you may be wondering why I am devoting my blog posts lately to the midterm election that just occurred. My reasoning for this is that I think so of the most creative data visualizations are created right before and after a major election cycle.

Today, I am showcasing some charts that were created by The New York Times which illustrate how voting blocs have shifted from the 1980s to now.

I found these to be very interesting and important.

I hope you enjoy reviewing these.

Regards,

Michael

Source: K.K. Rebecca Lai and Allison McCann, Exit Polls: How Voting Blocs Have Shifted From the ’80s to Now, The New York Times, November 7, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/07/us/elections/house-exit-polls-analysis.html.

Fi Gordon Bio

Fi Gordon is young at heart and totally passionate about data, She is a kiwi living in the best city in the world…. Sydney!  Fi loves to dive and explore the vast underwater playground, blowing bubbles is where she finds her Zen.

Fi has been working with data for 15 years and has been fortunate to be introduced to Tableau. It has completely changed the way that she works, and she is hoping that sharing her story will inspire others, just as she been inspired by the Tableau community.

Questions

Michael: Hi Fi. Can you tell my readers a bit about your Tableau Quest Playbook? What was your inspiration for creating it and how it can help the Tableau community?

Fi: Thanks for having me on your blog – your guests on here are amazing, I’m humbled to be invited to chat!

The Tableau Quest came about after the perfect storm: my team was asking to use newer tech, they wanted more formal/informal training, and we could improve our speed to insight by enabling everyone with Tableau.

Part of any decent change management program is providing people with the knowledge of how they can use the tooling, and I was inspired by a keynote speaker from Tableau’s Data Day Out to make sure my team felt they had a sense of progress.  I sat down with the BI crew who were already using Tableau, and we whiteboarded a bunch of challenges that would help people learn, practice, and get certified.  One of the team, Sharad Joshi, suggested we turn it into a gamified program of work, sprinkling in a sense of friendly competition between the team.

We built the first iteration of The Playbook, which takes people from rookies to rockstars, helping them to level up their skills and have some fun along the way.  The program was launched to the team, with a leaderboard and dozens of challenges and courses.

Turns out we didn’t get it completely right at the start, but there have been a few iterations, and the playbook that’s published on my website (available for download) is open for everyone in the community to use!  CommSec hasn’t opened up the viz & leaderboard, but it’s not too hard for a Tableau Developer to create.

So far, I’ve had the opportunity to present the quest to over 400 people, in Sydney, Melbourne, and New Orleans, and a bunch of organizations have started to implement it, many with their own changes and challenges thrown in for good measure.  If you’re interested in learning more about the Tableau Quest, either personally or to roll out at your organization, you can check out my recorded session here.

It can be overwhelming knowing where to start, or how to become a Tableau Rockstar, so now the community have a road map of how to level up.  Anyone can do the Quest and it’s cheap! Only US$1,300 (for training and certification).  Good luck!

Michael: You are a BI Strategist Director at JLL. Can you tell us a little about what you do in this position?

Fi: Great question, I’m going to be learning all about my new role which I’m starting this week!  Kudos to the power of the Tableau Community, Paul Chapman suggested I might want to look at the role, and it’s shaping up to be the role of a lifetime.

JLL has a strong technology focus to drive transformation, and my role is to help build the BI strategy for their APAC Facilities Management business.  I’ll be working between the business & IT, understanding client’s needs, how to create structured processes such as effective briefing, to deliver insights through data visualization and predictive analytics, driving cost down and optimizing processes where possible.

I’ve got some healthy competition, with Paul Chapman’s team who have been on the journey for a few years, with considerable cost savings – you can hear about Paul’s successes in his TC18 talk here.  In all seriousness, I’m delighted to join the team, leverage some of the great work that’s been delivered in EMEA, and collaborate with them to help them out wherever possible.

Michael: I see that you are an avid scuba diver. I love stories about sunken ships and searching for hidden treasure (The Deep is one of my favorite movies). Have you had an opportunity to explore any sunken ships and do you have a unique story to tell about it?

Fi: Yes!  When I’m finally ready to stop talking data, I love to dive.  I’ve clocked over 150 dives, mostly in Australia and the Maldives.  I have been on tiny wreck dives before, but I love a healthy reef with plenty of pretty fish & sharks! The scariest moment I’ve had whilst diving was due to an o-ring blowing, which meant I was dumping air rapidly.  Fortunately, I had a great dive buddy with loads of experience. She followed the steps for a controlled emergency ascent, and we made it to the surface safely.  We quickly fixed the seal, and went straight back down!

Michael: You are a Social Ambassador for Tableau. Can you tell us how you were selected as a Social Ambassador and what duties this role has?

Fi: Tableau runs an incredible Ambassador program that highlights individuals across the globe who go above the normal call of duty on social media, community forums, Tableau Public, and lead Tableau User Groups.  As a Social Ambassador, I tweet and blog about Tableau.  Tableau sometimes asks Ambassadors for feedback and ideas for the community, to participate in alpha and beta programs, and we are also there to lend a hand.

I was lucky to be selected a few years ago as an Ambassador by Tableau. If someone was interested in trying to be a Social Ambassador, I’d recommend that they:

1. Start a blog
2. Create a twitter account, and make it focused on data
3. Build a network of followers
4. Play to their strengths and help others out

Starting in 2018 Tableau opened up nominations from the Tableau Community to help them select new ambassadors. A committee of Tableau employees looks at all the nominations and the current group to select new ambassadors to serve a one year term. If a current ambassador is in good standing they are highly likely to be selected to stay on for another term and may be asked to help as a mentor for the new additions.

Michael: Can you tell us three of your favorite Tableau Desktop tips and tricks?

Fi: Oh, this is a toughie!  My type of job typically means I don’t get to spend a lot of time on the tools, and more time spent enabling people with the right tools and strategy.  One of my favorite things to do is to help people with viz critique, so I’ll give you my top tips and tricks on delivering a great viz instead:

1. Nail your briefing! It’s widely accepted that data is important to help drive great outcomes, but that can mean an avalanche of work is coming down the pipe.  Defining a problem statement that addresses the 4W’s: Who is affected?  What is the problem? Where does it happen? And finally (the critical question to define whether the data is actually needed: Why does it matter? These questions will each help to provide the foundation for a great delivery. Once the problem statement is defined, it will lead you into plenty of questions.
2. Their Shoes Not Yours! Design your vizzes by stepping into the shoes of your consumers. User empathy is an important step to incorporate when you’re developing. Are you solving your problem statement, with the minimum of information that is required?  Is it easy to understand?  Would someone be able to look at the viz, and quickly assess where they need to take action?Consider how you feel when you visit a poorly designed website, you’re unlikely to stay for too long, or make a purchase.  The same theory applies to your visualizations.  Think about what your end user will be thinking and feeling when they open your viz for the first time: will they stay for long? Will they know how to navigate?  Will they return?  Or will they simply shut it down because there’s too much cognitive load?!
3. Great Vizzes Incorporate BANs: Big Ass Numbers!! Tableau has completed an eye-tracking study that shows people are attracted to the BIG numbers on the screen. From there, your choice of visualization will help the end user uncover insight.  There’s plenty of other top tips in their research, I suggest you take a look here.

PS – if that’s not your cup of tea, I’d recommend you hit up Ann Jackson and Lorna Eden’s TC18 session on speed tipping. You’ll have over 100 tips to nourish your mind and satisfy your Desktop desires.

Michael: Now that you have attended TC18 in New Orleans, can you tell us your three favorite things you learned there?

Fi: Tableau Conference is something that every Tableau user should try to attend at least once!  This year was my fifth US conference and tenth globally, and each time it’s a different experience.  I had two goals for this conference network & coach: mission successful!

I had two goals for this conference network & coach: mission successful!

This year Tableau introduced the concept of Braindates: people could choose to coach, or get mentored, or have a group discussion.  I offered three different sessions on data literacy, negotiation, and answering tough questions.  It was a great opportunity to meet new people, and make new friends:  shout out to everyone who joined me! If anyone is keen to set up a coaching session on any of the topics, I’d be happy to set up (free) 30-minute sessions.

Next up, I got to geek out with a bunch of server admins.  Tableau Server is not often the golden child of the community; however, it is the way we can share and collaborate at our organizations: without it, our vizzes would reach fewer people!  Tamas Foldi opened our eyes, with a great session on why extensions are very cool but could be dangerous with data leakage.  Paul Banoub followed up this session with a fabulous blog, Do you manage Tableau in your organization? You must read it before deploying any software (Desktop or Server) from version 2018.2 and above (give yourself the knowledge of what could become an issue). 

Adam Grant, Organizational Psychologist and Professor at Wharton University, delivered a kick-ass keynote.  Adam shared many great insights, but the one that stuck out for me most was around how to avoid burnout and still get the feels for giving back. He recommended “chunking” the time you spend on helping others into close succession, rather than “sprinkling” different times throughout the week.  I highly recommend checking out his website to see his ted-talks and other content.

By spending my time networking & coaching, I’ve ended up watching sessions afterward!  This meant I capitalized on the time spent face-to-face and now get to prioritize the sessions that will help me the most. You can too!  Head over to Tableau’s YouTube Channel to get access to all of the content

Michael: What is next on your “To Do” list? What can the Tableau community expect to see from you in the near future?

Fi: Well… there will be another TFF APAC, more Sydney TUGs, and maybe even a Singapore TUG visit?!  I’m attending the Singapore Data Day Out this week – I can’t get enough!

On the horizon, I’d like to set up formalized collaboration between organizations, where we can develop out concepts in a POC, without the burden of the full cost.  Let’s see how far we can push the community to achieve incredible outcomes across the globe!

Thanks again for the opportunity for being a guest on your blog – I’ve had a blast!  Look forward to catching up again.