Yikes – I’m getting old in Tableau years. This week I clicked on a Tableau Public post I thought sounded interesting: 3 Tips to Overcoming the Excel Barrier to Tableau Adoption. Wow, I thought, the Tableau Public team is so in tune, and that sounds just like something I would say. Interested to hear their take, I clicked on the article to discover I had wrote it in May of 2016! Ah, May 2016. A time before I started Playfair Data, my Twitter handle was @OSMGuy, and the Kansas City Royals were defending World Series Champions. I also had an epiphany. I thought back to all the posts I’ve shared a ..read more

This post shows you how to automatically isolate the last two partial date ranges so you can compare an equal number of days period over period. Last week I showed you how to compare the last two complete date periods in Tableau, but sometimes you want the comparison to be even more current. For example, you may want to compare this week to last week even if the week is not yet complete instead of comparing the last full week to the full week from two weeks ago. The benefit to this is timelier analysis, but you can often end up with an ‘apples to oranges’ comparison. For example, if it’s Wedne ..read more

This post aims to help you harness dates in Tableau to create powerful comparisons in your dashboards. You will learn how to isolate the last two full reporting periods – whether they be days, weeks, months, quarters, or years – so can compare the last complete date part to the date part preceding it (i.e. last week compared to the week before). The calculations shared in this post can be used as a foundation to: (1) create period over period percent or index changes, (2) filter your dashboards to only the most recent dates, and (3) normalize the dates so they overlap on the same axis. While t ..read more

This is the fifth and final post in a series on dashboard gauges in Tableau. To this point, we’ve covered bullet graphs, rounded gauges, custom background images, and ‘stock ticker’ gauges. For this final installment, we’ll have some fun and use custom shapes that dynamically change based on performance. Like the stock ticker gauge, most shapes are not the best choice for visualizing magnitude, but just like sometimes when you need something other than a bar chart, sometimes you need a gauge other than a bullet graph. I like the custom shape indicators I’m sharing because they: (1) immediately ..read more

This is the fourth in a five-part series on dashboard gauges in Tableau. For future updates, subscribe to my mailing list. The next gauge I will show you how to build in Tableau was inspired by the stock tickers seen on major news networks and stock portfolio apps. The visualization typically features the positive or negative change of a stock or index, preceded by an up or down colored triangle, and are occasionally enclosed by a colored rectangle to reinforce the change. You may not initially think of this as a gauge, but in this series, gauges are defined as chart types that show progress t ..read more

Thank you for your support in 2018. This time of year is always a time of reflection for me, and one consistent theme I’m grateful for - and which I’ve come to realize is the single biggest-driving force behind my career - is you: the community. Your support has not only inspired me, it has made it possible for me to grow personally. You have forced me to sharpen my skills by teaching and challenged me to provide better solutions. So Thank You. Each year, I ask how could the next possibly be better, but 2018 included more huge updates: (1) I rebranded my analytics consulting agency, Ryan Sleep ..read more

This is the third in a five-part series on dashboard gauges in Tableau. For future updates, subscribe to my mailing list. To this point in the series, I’ve shown you my favorite type of gauge with bullet graphs and a way to round gauges when your primary objective is to track progress to 100%. In the next example, I will show you how to make a gauge with any image. I learned this trick from Lindsey Poulter in her visualization, Best States to Raise Children. Downloading Tableau Public visualizations and reverse engineering them is one of the best ways to pick up new techniques. In the visualiz ..read more

This is the second in a five-part series on dashboard gauges in Tableau. For future updates, subscribe to our mailing list. While bullet graphs are the optimal type of ‘gauge’ in Tableau because of their efficient use of space and their ability to show values past 100%, there are other engaging ways to display the progress toward a goal or prior period. If your primary objective is to communicate how much progress you’ve made toward hitting the 100% mark, and you don’t mind not seeing performance past the goal, you can stop the scale at 100%. This lends itself to some interesting design possib ..read more

This is the first in a five-part series on dashboard gauges in Tableau. For future updates, subscribe to my mailing list. Speedometer-like dashboard gauges that show an arrow moving across a semi-circle consume an unnecessarily large amount of valuable real estate and are not ideal for communicating or interpreting magnitude. This series aims to provide five alternative dashboard gauges to help illustrate comparisons to prior periods or goals. I feel legally obligated to start the series off with Stephen Few’s, bullet graphs, as he really helped pioneer the idea of making gauges more streamlin ..read more

Tableau set actions are a new (as of version 2018.3) type of dashboard action that will unlock new user experiences by allowing you to dynamically control which dimension members are included in a set. Some of my favorites that have already been figured out include How to Highlight with Color by Matt Chambers, How to Change Dimensions by Lindsey Poulter,  How to Make a Cross-Highlight by Rody Zakovich, and How to Drilldown in a Single Sheet by Ann Jackson, just to name a few. A general thread that I’ve noticed between the innovative applications of set actions is they’re often used to mak ..read more