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Using GitHub Pages to host your visualizations

Mar 4, 2020
3 min

Using GitHub Pages to host your visualizations

Back in December I shared a viz created on Tableau Public sumoviz.org but I did that using a custom domain. I was inspired by some of the visualizations I often see from Information is Beautiful as they have their own domain and are shared as a project. While researching I came across a simple and cheap way to do this. If however you only want to share your visualization without being in the Tableau Public Website here’s the way to do it: Add the following parameter to the en

Color is in the eye of the beholder

Feb 20, 2020
5 min

Color is in the eye of the beholder

Last summer I had the opportunity to speak at the Tableau European conference taking place in Berlin. This talk was under the banner of lighting talks, these talks were meant to inspire and be thought provoking. I choose to speak about Color, more precisely how we as individuals perceive color. Not so much the bio-mechanics of it, but how our cultures, experiences and place of birth may influence our color perception. The inspiration came from an episode in Las Vegas not so

Parameter Actions

Aug 2, 2019
6 min

Parameter Actions

tldr: here’s the workbook if you can’t wait to break it apart and don’t care for reading tutorials Tableau 2019.2 brings with it an amazing new featured called Parameter Actions. For me it’s without a doubt one of the best new features in a long time and one that allows for some amazing new things in Tableau as well as some great time savers and better user experience in Tableau. What are Parameter Actions? Filippos Lymperopoulos has a nice explanation. Parameters in Tableau

Tableau Tip – Two Years, Two Averages

May 21, 2017
2 min

Tableau Tip – Two Years, Two Averages

Been a while since I wrote a Tableau Tip, these are always simple, hopefully useful and stem from day to do day questions I get asked. This week someone asked me: -“I have this timeline where I show sales, would it possible to show an average for 2016 and an average for 2017?” -Why do you need to show them separately? – I asked -“We have recruited 2 new sales people, and 2017 has seen a big increase in our sales, therefore showing an average for both 2016 and 2017 is not a tr

Makeover Monday: Fairground Accidents

Mar 7, 2016
1 min

Makeover Monday: Fairground Accidents

Hats off to Mr Cotgreave, letting everyone do a Makeover Monday of something you did 6 years ago is rather brave. The first thing I noticed with Andy’s original viz was the lack of context, there is no context or insight something I see in all of Andy’s visualizations now. That just goes to show how much has Andy improved over the years. I hope I can improve half as much. Here’s Andy’s original, and here’s mine, click to see interactive version: I thought a table to show the

Mar 4, 2016
2 min

Tableau Desktop Qualification

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while. At the end of the last year I sat (and passed) the Tableau Desktop Qualified Associate exam. Before I sat the exam I looked around for tips on studying and preparing for it, I found a couple things but not much so I thought I’d try and write a few guidelines for anyone wanting to sit the exam. I would probably split the exam this way 50% easy questions – think things like (how do I change a filter type from single to multiple)

#MakeoverMonday: Bandwidth

Feb 21, 2016
1 min

#MakeoverMonday: Bandwidth

Makeover Monday, turned into Makeover Sunday night. Business Insider are such a prolific bunch, they keep coming up with good content for Makeover Monday. There wasn’t a lot in this one apart from an odd “other”. I’m fine with the use of other when it represents a small part of the whole, but in this case I find it lazy journalism, ¼ of the bandwidth is going to other but the chart doesn’t provide us any indication of what other might be. Anyway, the best way to demonstrate t

Learning Kanji with Tableau

Feb 16, 2016
3 min

Learning Kanji with Tableau

I love Japan, the Japanese culture, history and language! For the past 4 years I studied Japanese & Spanish at Birkbeck, University of London and graduated last November, something that I’m incredibly proud of. Though since my last classes in July 15 I haven’t really studied much, not uncommon amongst students and probably the result of burnout due to studying part-time and working full time for 4 years. Somehow it also coincides with the time when I started to work more with

#makeovermonday: Video games

Feb 15, 2016
1 min

#makeovermonday: Video games

Another week another #makeovermonday, this time an horrible infographic from Forbes, confusing as well. See for yourself: There has been some discussion about the data on twitter and Andy Cotgreave has written a blog post about it. Andy talks about this week’s data I spent some time during lunch time, playing with gantt charts and indexing, something I wanted to learn for a while. See amazing post from Jonathan Drummey: Moving the Center Line of a Bar Chart with a Gantt Chart

Community & so much more…

Feb 7, 2016
3 min

Community & so much more…

This was a good week and I thought I’d tell you why I’m so proud of finding such an amazing community of Tableau users. I’ve seen a few things happening that I thought were worth sharing and those in the Tableau community know that these types of things happen fairly often, but they are definitely not the norm when it comes to software companies. On Tuesday night I joined a conference call that included Fi Gordon from Australia (7am), Bridget Cogley from Ohio(3pm), Paul Banou

#Makeovermonday: Travel Agents

Jan 31, 2016
2 min

#Makeovermonday: Travel Agents

Another week another #makeovermonday, inspired by Chris Love latest blog post on simplicity I thought it would be good to keep it simple as well. Have you thought about the reason why nowadays there are so many specialized travel agents? For instance if you want to go to Japan, you probably won’t use the same travel agent you would use to go to Machu Pichu, they are becoming quite specialised. But chances are you are probably booking it online and that shows in this week’s ch

Tip: “My filter is not available.”

Jan 21, 2016
1 min

Tip: “My filter is not available.”

Today I learned something new. While swapping connections across sites one of my filters stopped working. When looking into it on the worksheet I couldn’t figure out why, and when showing the filter Tableau was telling me that the filter wasn’t available. This was because Enable Auto Update for filter as disabled. I switched it on and my filter came back to life. Two ways of enabling this. Right Click Filter > Enable Auto Update Or Click Analysis at the top > Quick Filters >

Makeover Monday: Steph Curry

Jan 11, 2016
1 min

Makeover Monday: Steph Curry

There are so many initiatives in the Tableau community at the moment that’s hard to decide which ones to take part. This week I took part on #makeovermonday. This initiative is being spearheaded by Andy Kriebel and Andy Cotgreave and the goal is “how we each quickly take a foreign data set and turn it into a more meaningful visualisation.” Read more about it here: Makeover Monday We were given a news piece from UK Business Insider and a Tableau data extract which looked at ho

Visualizing numbeo.com indices

Jan 10, 2016
3 min

Visualizing numbeo.com indices

From Wikipedia – “Numbeo is a crowd-sourced global database of reported consumer prices, perceived crime rates, quality of health care, other statistics.” Last week numbeo.com released 2016’s indices and I have over the years spent more hours on that site than I care to admit. Mainly when daydreaming about other cities where to live, being an analyst I try to look at it objectively, at least that’s what I say to myself. When I received the email announcing the release of new

TalkingViz: Language matters! Bilingual analysis of early school leaving in EU.

Dec 20, 2015
5 min

TalkingViz: Language matters! Bilingual analysis of early school leaving in EU.

This my second post in a series that looks at my Tableau Public visualizations so far. As you know, I love Tableau and what we the users can achieve in mere minutes, at the same time I like learning new languages. So I was pretty pleased with the announcement that Tableau Communities was going to provide translation on the fly. #ISpeakData—How about You? Why does this matter? Some of the more seasoned forum helpers have already been using Google Translate to help users in oth

Talking viz: “NYC Guide”

Nov 23, 2015
3 min

Talking viz: “NYC Guide”

In the next few entries I want to talk about the various visualizations I’ve done in my free time, the choices behind it and how they differ from each other. New York City guide was my first viz to earn a “viz of the day”, August was meant to be a weird and wonderful month for Tableau Public, different ways of visualising data. With that in mind as my wife and I prepared our first trip to NYC, we kept a list of the places we wanted to visit. The list had bars, restaurants, mu

Data? But I don’t have any data!

Nov 8, 2015
2 min

Data? But I don’t have any data!

Shortly after publishing “the first one” I started to think about the experience of downloading Tableau and what to do next. I thought, watching the videos is cool and experimenting with the Superstore dataset is also good, but it can get old pretty fast as well. That’s why I thought my second post should be about open data and where to find it. Back in 2006 Professor Hans Rosling did a TED Talk which he called “The best stats you’ve ever seen”, go and watch it, it’s worth it

The first one…

Nov 2, 2015
2 min

The first one…

The first one… This post is the result of a conversation I had with my colleague David Sealey at work after I read one of his posts on linkedin. The first anything is always daunting, the first kiss, the first child, the first page of an author’s new book, you get the idea. David’s point was to do with blog posts and how we should just get the first one out of the way, so that we can focus on the second one and third and so on; the process gets easier as we go. With that in m