Introduction Blog posts are great for demonstrating a technique that you have found to be problematic and frustrating. While completing the work for another blog post on understanding Tableau trend models, I ran into a problem in Tableau that I could not easily resolve. I tried to resolve it for a while (even getting into…
Introduction I previously wrote about the need for better documentation on Tableau linear trend models. At the time, I was not able to examine the other types of trend models offered by Tableau, which include linear, logarithmic, exponential, and polynomial. This weekend I remembered to get back to the subject, which has lead to content…
Introduction I started my professional career in May, 1988, at a newly formed environmental engineering firm of less than 10 people in Knoxville, TN. I had just finished my Master’s degree in Geology but I had already been programming computers since 1977.
Background Just because something is trendy, don’t believe that it is good…Follow your own instincts. Donald Knuth, May 2, 2012. Over the past seven years, I have used Tableau Desktop to investigate over 1,000 different data sets. The data I have used is from many different businesses and industries. I have been very lucky to…
Introduction For years, I have dealt with an intrinsic assumption in Tableau that really hampers my ability to get work done when using the Pages shelf. This assumption makes it nearly impossible to efficiently create publication quality charts when the pages shelf (Figure 1) is used to produce a large number of charts.
Introduction If you work with large, diverse data sets, you know that there will invariably be noise and erroneous data in the database you are using. This is one reason why I treat all data as guilty until proven innocent.
Introduction Whenever I have a recurring question asked to me about a Tableau Desktop feature, I realize that something is not quite intuitive in the software and needs to be fixed. Such is the case with the Tableau trend models as they are currently described in the software.
Introduction Today there is a CNN headline that gives some predictions about the 2013 hurricane season. Click here to read the story. This reminded me of the hurricane data that I worked on recently, using Tableau to investigate spatial and temporal trends over the past 40 years. If you want to examine the data for…
Introduction I work with a lot of site-specific data that typically does not have latitude and longitude information included. I am generally given an address, city, state and zip for the data location. Although Tableau will automatically map this data at the state, city, and zip levels using generated latitude and longitude, many times I…
Today was Jett’s second birthday. We took pictures throughout the day, starting about 10 am and ending about 4:30 pm. During those 6.5 hours, over 1650 pictures were taken. Normally my extraordinarily talented wife Toni will turn these pictures into a book printed by the service Shutterfly. I love these books. They are very special…
A couple of weeks ago, I started capturing Twitter data that had the hashtag #Plantpower in the tweet. I wrote about the motivation for this in another blog post. This information is stored in a database that is automatically updated over time. This post is intended to help people learn how to use Tableau dashboards…
Today I was creating a scatter plot in Tableau using about 1.5 years of monthly data. All the data points looked like they correlated nicely except for the March 2013 data point. With March 2013 included in the trend line calculation, the scatter plot looked like this and the r-squared was 59.4%: If the outlier…
Rich Roll (and his wife Julie Piatt) have been the best teachers I’ve had in a very long time. Rich is amazing and continues to deliver incredible content to many people through his podcasts, Twitter activities, website and his book Finding Ultra.
Today (8/8/13), CNN Money posted a story about Golfers and the “Major Money” they make by winning Major tournaments. Conceptually the visualization is very good but the execution is just OK (I can think of a few improvements). The biggest problem: the data is WRONG! Check it out for yourself by clicking here! They should…
The Term: The Cruise Effect. Definition: Gaining weight on a cruise ship is really easy. Losing that weight is not so easy. I would like to tell you about a two-month study that I just completed. The first month happened before I took a 5-day cruise from Charleston, S.C. to the Bahamas and back.