DATA VISUALIZATION – ANALYTICS – EDUCATION
Tell me more, tell me more! In this post, we’ll look at how to use Tableau’s dynamic zone visibility to let users “zoom in” on dashboard elements to get to a more detailed view.
(New to dynamic zones? Start here)
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Pop-up boxes in Tableau can be used for filters, zooms, or extra information – and more! Dynamic zone visibility makes these pop-ups even more fancy by allowing multiple objects to be shown and hidden with one click. That lets us add image layers for extra formatting and a slicker user experience.
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BANs (big numbers representing KPIs or other important info that pop out to users immediately) are a powerful tool in any dashboard creator’s arsenal. In today’s post, we’ll explore how you can use Dynamic Zone Visibility to make your BAN layout change as your dashboard changes.
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Too many charts, too little dashboard space? In today’s post, the first in my series about use cases for Tableau’s Dynamic Zone Visibility, we’ll look at how to swap between multiple charts with a single parameter. (New to dynamic zones? Start here)
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Dynamic Zone Visibility was added to Tableau in update 2022.3, and it’s one of the most powerful new features of the last few years. I’m going to be starting a series of articles about the many use cases for dynamic zones, from obvious to wacky. This first post will cover the basics of what they are and how to use them – if you haven’t used dynamic zones before, start here!
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The Level Up series is designed to take Tableau beginners from out-of-the-box functionality to the next level of design and analytics, and features tip and tricks to make your dashboards more professional and polished. Make sure to check out the other posts in the Level Up series before you go!
Ever wanted to change the size or filters when you put a viz into a Tableau tool tip? In this post, we’ll look at a couple quick ways to customize your viz in tool tip options.
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I recently passed Tableau’s Data Analyst exam, and became a Tableau Certified Data Analyst! In today’s post, I’ll share my experience with the exam, what to prepare for (+how to prepare), and whether the certification is worth it.
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The Level Up series is designed to take Tableau beginners from out-of-the-box functionality to the next level of design and analytics, and features tip and tricks to make your dashboards more professional and polished. Make sure to check out the other posts in the Level Up series before you go!
Tableau graphs allow you to add multiple mark layers, which has a surprising number of uses. Today, I’m going to demonstrate how to make a chart like the ones above. These charts show a time trend over multiple decades (using the line mark), but also call out the specific decade we’re looking at (using the circle mark). The circle moves when the decade parameter is changed, which gives the user a helpful “You Are Here” marker.
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Let’s talk about donuts! (Not the powdered sugar kind, sadly). Donut charts are an alternative to pie charts that offer a few extra advantages. In this post, I’ll talk about when (and when not) to use donut charts, and demonstrate how to make them in Tableau.
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In this Level Up post, I’ll show you how to configure your preferences.tps file to add custom Tableau color palettes.
The Level Up series is designed to take Tableau beginners from out-of-the-box functionality to the next level of design and analytics, and features tip and tricks to make your dashboards more professional and polished. Click here to see all posts in the series.
There are some amazing tools for designing custom Tableau color palettes that members of the data community have created, and it’s been an especially popular topic recently. (Some of my favorites: Josh Tapley’s Color Palette Generator, Brittany Rosenau’s Palette Previewer, and – just for fun – Will Sutton’s Pokemon Color Schemes). In this post, we’ll go over everything you need to know about adding custom color palettes to your Tableau install.
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The Level Up series is designed to take Tableau beginners from out-of-the-box functionality to the next level of design and analytics, and features tip and tricks to make your dashboards more professional and polished. Click here to see all posts in the series.
I’ve got a quick upgrade for you today! In this post, I’ll show you how to add a timestamp to your dashboards that shows the last time the data was updated. It’s especially helpful for live data, or manually refreshed extracts, but it’s also just a good habit to include on all pages.
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In this Level Up installment, we’re using pop-up filter boxes to declutter Tableau dashboards.
The Level Up series is designed to take Tableau beginners from out-of-the-box functionality to the next level of design and analytics, and features tip and tricks to make your dashboards more professional and polished. Click here to see all posts in the series.
I work with a lot of education data, which means that there are a whole lot of different ways to group students – by demographics, by programs, by history, by focus group, and more. My users need to be able to filter on all of these subgroups. Because of this, my dashboards have lots of filter options! Making all these filters visible would be confusing and overwhelming, so I use pop-up filter boxes instead. In this post, I’ll take you through how to create easy pop-ups to organize your filters in Tableau.
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In today’s Level Up post, we explore creating custom labels in Tableau to suit the values in a field, like making singular and plural variations.
The Level Up series is designed to take Tableau beginners from out-of-the-box functionality to the next level of design and analytics, and features tip and tricks to make your dashboards more professional and polished. Click here to see all posts in the series.
Adding extra text details to your labels in Tableau makes visuals easier to interpret and clearer. But what happens when the text doesn’t work for every single value in your data? This often comes up when you have both singular and plural values. If the label above said “One speak English”, it would seem a lot less credible! In this post, I’ll show you how to use a calculated field to customize the text in your labels.
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Adding parameter actions to your dashboards opens up a whole new world of design possibilities! In this post, I’ll demonstrate a way to change parameters by clicking on an icon (instead of the default drop-down or toggle), making use of parameter actions.
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When you get to explain a dashboard live to users, it’s easy to go over all the features. But what happens when you’re not around? One way to help users navigate your dashboard is to add a help overlay that pops up when they click a “help” icon on the dashboard. In this post, I’ll go over a simple method to add this overlay using Figma.
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(Generated Sample Data)
Have you ever gotten to the end of presenting a gorgeous interactive dashboard only for an audience member to say, “Well, this looks great – but where do we download the spreadsheet with all this information?” (Just me?)
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The webpage dashboard item in Tableau has a nearly unlimited number of uses. One that clicked into place for me recently was the ability to embed surveys into dashboards to collect new information from users without the need for a third-party Tableau add on.
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Word clouds – randomly arranged collections of the most common words used in a text, where word size varies with how frequently it’s used – have a bit of a mixed reputation in data analytics circles. While the argument can certainly be made that there are more precise ways of showing word frequency, it’s also true that they’re an easy, user-friendly way to quickly pull out common ideas from a text. I recently used a word cloud to visualize responses to a community engagement survey, at the request of a stakeholder, and really enjoy how some of the most important recurring themes in the answers spring to the surface.
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