Introduction

The following work is circa October 2010, and at the time I was using Tableau version 5.2!

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How Was Tableau Used as a Graphical Post-Processor?

During 2009 and 2010, I completely re-engineered and re-wrote some major company software (about 25,000 lines of code) to bring it up to contemporary professional standards.  The software is proprietary so I cannot say too much about what it does other than to say that is in the class of “Design of Experiments“, or “Experimental Design“.  The software does computations and produces output that is effectively visualized with Tableau.  Although the computer code produces its own graphics within Excel, I wrote a module to produce output that could be piped to Tableau.  The Tableau output is far superior to anything that can be done in Excel so it was a fun exercise.

Below are a few examples of the graphics produced by Tableau.

The main purpose of this post is to show how Tableau can be used to effectively post-process output from customized computer codes. Although this particular software produces model output of various dimensions, I am still able to use Tableau to visualize the output because I created a series of templates that can handle problems of varying dimensions. This generalized approach is very powerful and makes Tableau an excellent platform for producing publication quality graphics.