This post includes some of my favourite tips to help save time when building dashboards. From keyboard shortcuts to formatting to working with containers.
Dashboard Productivity Tips
Travel Planner & Emissions Calculator
This post highlights some of the techniques used in this travel planner dashboard that allows you to draw out two routes on a map, select the methods of transport and then compare them by distance and carbon emissions.
Resizing Marks on a Dashboard
Needing to switch back to a sheet to use the size slider is not always ideal for making fine grained size adjustments on dashboards. This tip shows how you can use a parameter directly on a dashboard instead.
Area Spatial Function
Version 2021.2 sees the introduction of a new spatial function: Area. This blog and workbook include a few examples along with a couple of cautionary notes.
Creating a dot-dash-plot in Tableau
This post steps through how to create Edward Tufte's dot-dash-plot in Tableau, increasing the data-ink ratio of a standard scatter plot and revealing more insights.
Creating Animated Line Charts in Tableau
This post walks through the process and Pages History settings to use for creating animated line charts in Tableau
Mapbox Data Visualisation Component
Mapbox recently added a data visualisation component to Mapbox Studio, which enables the creation of custom spatial data visualisations using imported data directly within Mapbox. This blog walks through how to create a map of Airbnb locations in London using the component.
Reflections on the #30DayChartChallenge
The #30DayChartChallenge ran for the first time in April 2021. This post gives a high-level overview of the challenge, my learnings and links to all the data sources I used.
Adding Percentage Lines to Bars
This post walks through a method to quickly add lines over bars to show segments, which could be used at specific values or percentages.
Creating Multi-Step Help Overlay Screens
Help overlay screens can help orient your dashboard consumers; providing context, instructions and the intended flow of analysis. This post shows you how you can create multi-step help overlay screens using background images.
Geospatial Analysis with Map Layers
With the ability to combine and overlay more spatial data, the Map Layers functionality enables a wider variety of geospatial analyses. This post walks through an example of searching for an Airbnb in London that meets different criteria.
Creating Custom UIs with Map Layers
This blog post explores using Tableau’s new Map Layers feature to create custom User Interface elements such as popup charts, viz in tooltips and custom URL links.
Five Ways to use Images in Tableau
This post and associated workbook describe five methods of adding images to your Tableau visualisations including shapes, viz-in-tooltips, web objects, background images and image objects.
Tableau Map Layers
The new Map Layers feature allows you overlay multiple marks layers on a map removing the need to use a dual axis and opening up new possibilities for visualising multiple sources of spatial data.
Circular Sankey Template
This guest blog post by CJ Mayes provides a template and walkthrough of the process to create a circular Sankey diagram. With credits to Spencer Baucke and Luke Stanke.
Creating Links to Google Maps from Tableau Tooltips
If you have latitude and longitude fields in your data, you can create tooltip URL actions to open Google Maps in a browser at the exact location of those fields for any row in your data. This blog walks through how to create these links.
Swap Charts with a Parameter
This post explores different parameter configurations and the resulting user interface elements that are available for each, then shows how a parameter can be used to swap the visible chart on a dashboard.
Using Custom Mapbox Maps in Tableau
This post walks through how to create a basic custom Mapbox map, publish it and import it into Tableau Desktop for use as the background to a visualisation.
Creating Charts within a Hexmap
In this guest blog post Tamás Varga explains how you can create charts within a hexmap; a technique he used for a recent #MakeoverModay visualisation. Tamás also shares some of his design process and sources of inspiration.
Hierarchical Selections in Tableau
This post explores an approach for implementing hierarchical selections in Tableau which can be used for filtering and highlighting.
