• Reveal Charts in stages (Dynamic Zones #6)

    Reveal Charts in stages (Dynamic Zones #6)

    Have you ever created a Tableau chart that’s just… too much? When a visual contains a lot of data, many marks, or lots of detail, it can easily become overwhelming for a viewer. And when your viewers become overwhelmed, they may just move on. In today’s post, we’ll look at how dynamic zone visibility can […]

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  • Level Up: Custom Legends in Tableau

    Level Up: Custom Legends in Tableau

    Tableau does a pretty good job with its default color legends for charts – little squares of color, labels, the usual – but sometimes you just need something a little more special. In today’s post, the next in the Level Up Series, I’ll show you a couple of use cases where you might want a […]

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  • 6 Tips For Inheriting a Dashboard

    6 Tips For Inheriting a Dashboard

    When you work with Tableau professionally, one thing is inevitable: Sooner or later, you’re going to inherit a dashboard that someone else built. If you’re lucky, it’ll be a dashboard from a reliable team member who is still around to answer questions. If you’re less lucky, it’ll be from someone who left the company and […]

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  • Advanced Tableau Color Palettes

    Advanced Tableau Color Palettes

    Good Tableau visualization relies heavily on good use of color. Tableau provides a selection of default color palettes, which are a pretty solid place to start; however, there’s plenty of room to do better! Last year, I wrote about how to create your own custom color palettes in this blog post. Today, we’ll zoom in […]

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  • Level Up: ‘Reset Filters’ Button (With No Highlighting!)

    Level Up: ‘Reset Filters’ Button (With No Highlighting!)

    When you have a Tableau dashboard with lots of filtering options, it’s easy to dive too deep into the filters and get a bit lost. When that happens to your users, an easy “reset filters” button is a lifeline! Creating a handy one-click way to clear filters is an essential skill in every Tableau designer’s […]

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  • Building Low-Maintenance Dashboards

    Building Low-Maintenance Dashboards

    I try to avoid making super generalized statements about dashboard development, but here’s one: Manual maintenance on dashboards is not good. (By ‘manual maintenance’, I mean anything that requires you to periodically come back to the dashboard to change values, update calculations, edit visuals, etc, just to keep it working.) It can’t always be avoided, […]

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