Notes on Tableau and Data Visualisation
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.
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.
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.
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.
This post walks through the process and Pages History settings to use for creating animated line charts in Tableau
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.
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.
This post walks through a method to quickly add lines over bars to show segments, which could be used at specific values or percentages.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This post explores an approach for implementing hierarchical selections in Tableau which can be used for filtering and highlighting.
The PREVIOUS_VALUE table calculation can be used to make custom versions of running sum calculations and generate comma separated lists of items. This blog gives an overview with these and other examples.
