Introduction When it comes to visualizing financial data, it is often required to combine cumulative and non-cumulative values in one visualization (and yes: tables are also visualizations ), like for example in a Profit & Loss statement. https://public.tableau.com/profile/klaus.schulte#!/vizhome/PuL/Dashboard1 While positions like revenues, cost of sales, selling expenses or income taxes are non-cumulative, we also have sub-totals like gross profit, operating profit (EBIT), profit before income taxes (EBT) and net profit, which are cumulative on sub-total level. Unfortunately, we cannot c ..read more

I’ve been experimenting with Viz-in-Labels lately like in my 9M Profit Bridge on Deutsche Bank’s financial report data or my custom treemap on Tableau’s superstore data. Deutsche Bank 9M Profit Bridge https://public.tableau.com/profile/klaus.schulte#!/vizhome/DeutscheBank9M2019ProfitBridge/DeutscheBank9M2019ProfitBridge Custom Treemaps in Tableau https://public.tableau.com/profile/klaus.schulte#!/vizhome/CustomTreemapSuperstoreSales/CustomTreemap Viz-in-Label (or Viz-in-Marks) is a technique to visualize more than one data relationship at once. In both visualizations above, the chosen primary ..read more

by Klaus Schulte & Ivett Kovács Thanks for joining our session at #data19! In this blog you can find all the resources we mentioned. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us with further questions! Session Description Ever wondered whether you can create something completely custom in Tableau? Come along with Zen Master and Iron Viz Champion Klaus Schulte and Tableau Ambassador Ivett Kovacs for an in-depth view of how to draft and create completely custom visualizations. Attendees of this session will learn how to approach the advanced techniques used to build surprisingly innovative visualizati ..read more

For this month’s #sportsvizsunday challenge I created this scatter plot on shot efficiency, goals, and shots on goals of NHL’s TOP 25 all-time points leaders. Key elements here are the reference bands indicating goals shot by a player in a season as the product of shots on goal (x-axis) and shot efficiency (y-axis). These reference bands add a fourth dimension to the scatter plot beside the two axes and the size of the bubbles, visualizing games played in the corresponding season. A nice technique to add context to your visualization. I’ve blogged about reference bands in scatter plots (first ..read more

3D charts are widely regarded as bad practice in the context of visualizing data. 3D adds no additional information. On the contrary, it clutters the viz and often complicates the visual perception of information. It can only get worse when you add bananas. An easy one this time. I used this horror chart for my #dataviz redesign series. What's not to improve right? Thanks @PhilipDRiggs for the 'inspiration'. You can read my blogpost with design choices and a link to github with #rstats code. https://t.co/LqukVQwZ67 pic.twitter.com/Se8Bi1wdyR — Thomas de Beus (@TdeBeus) January 8, 2018 Ho ..read more

by Klaus Schulte & Rosario Gauna Data Densification – you will have already come across this topic, when you have gone beyond ‘Show Me’ in Tableau: You’ve added curvy aspects to your designs with curved lines or polygons, you’ve created radial bar charts, or you’ve created other visualizations, where the original data was simply not enough, to let your design idea come to life. For all these mentioned and unmentioned use cases, you have used Data Densification to enrich the original data by adding extra points. 1. Data Densification There are a lot of good blogs around describing the tec ..read more

Ok, this is probably not a big thing, but I have been thinking about it for quite a while now: How can I encode change in line charts accurately? Wait: Encoding change in line charts? Change is of course already encoded in line charts. For example, when we look at Superstore sales by month we can see the change: when the line goes down, we have a negative change compared to the previous month and when the line goes up, we have a positive change. Everyone can read a line chart, so again: not a big thing. So, what is this all about? When you want to highlight certain months now, for e ..read more

This week I had a lot of fun recreating Lorna Eden’s #WorkoutWednesday2019 challenge. One key element was to implement a custom sort control (click to play with the interactive version on Tableau Public): We should use a parameter to allow a sort by (city) A-Z, (city) Z-A, (profit) asc, and (profit) desc. I really loved to see how everyone found her or his way to implement this. Create a Sort Parameter First thing you need isto create is a sort parameter. I created this one: I chose an integer parameter mainly because it is easier to reference in the calculated field you have to create in th ..read more

a collaborative blog by Ken Flerlage and Klaus Schulte The Challenge Last week at work I (Klaus) puzzled my head over an interesting question. I was looking at production orders and production dates and had to calculate differences between production dates: If a production order has consecutive production days (the datediff between the days is 1) then the machine only has to be equipped once. If the datediff between two production days is >1, the machine has to be equipped on each production date. The Table Calculation-Approach My first impulse was: Table Calculations! This should be some ..read more

When I was reading a news website earlier today I had this nice user experience when I was hovering this chart: I really like that you don’t have to follow the line chart to get the tooltip. Especially when you have a very thin line it can be hard in Tableau to hit the line to get the tooltip. So, how can this be done in Tableau? I experimented a little bit with set actions, but the performance wasn’t good enough to come even close to the performance of my model. So, I finally ended up with this: This technique has the same performance, however I had to get rid of the dot highlighting the co ..read more