VizWiz

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September 26, 2024

Stop Chart Disasters NOW With This Crucial Method

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How many times have you seen a chart with so many colors that you can't see one from the others? 

In this tip, I show you a simple technique for ensuring your users don't make a mess of the charts you design. I call them spaghetti charts. 

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I'm Andy Kriebel.

I help people become so good at Tableau that they don't need me any more. 

If you have a goal of becoming the best of the best, go to nextleveltableau.com for more information.

August 30, 2024

How to Create a Win/Loss Sparkline

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A win/loss sparkline is a tiny, horizontal chart that visually represents a series of binary outcomes, typically wins and losses. It's often used in sports, sales, or any context where success or failure can be quantified.

How it works:
1. Simple representation: Each data point is represented by a small shape or symbol.
2. Binary outcomes: Wins are usually indicated by one color or shape, while losses are indicated by another.
3. Quick understanding: At a glance, viewers can easily see the overall trend of wins and losses over a period.

Benefits of win/loss sparklines:
1. Compact and efficient: They take up minimal space and provide a lot of information.
2. Easy to understand: Even those unfamiliar with charts can quickly grasp the meaning.
3. Ideal for trends: They're great for quickly identifying trends and patterns in data.

In essence, win/loss sparklines offer a simple yet effective way to visualize binary outcomes, making them a valuable tool for various applications.

Check out the workbook here.

August 15, 2024

How Popular is Your Birthday?

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I love a chart where you don't need to write any commentary to understand the chart or to understand the analysis. This is one of those charts.

Click on your birthday to see how popular it is.

July 8, 2024

Build an interactive Tableau dashboard in 3 minutes!

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Build 80% of your dashboards with these 4 charts, a bit of interactivity, and that's it.

You probably won't need to create anything fancy, formatting will be minimal, and you won't need to wrestle with containers.

This video show you how to create it in only 3 minutes!


June 30, 2024

How to Rank & Filter the Top 5 in Tableau in Under 60 Seconds!

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In this tip, you will learn how to show the rank of each team in MLB by homeruns for 24 seasons. 

We'll start by computing the RANK table calculation for each Season before filtering to only the top 5 Teams in each Season.

June 28, 2024

How to Replace a Datasource & Fields in Tableau

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Need to change a datasource but don't want to rebuild the workbook? Has a field name changed? 

It can be a real pain to update each sheet in a workbook one by one. 

Conveniently, Tableau allows you to change the entire datasource with the "Replace Datasource" option.

Or, if you only need to change a field, Tableau has an option called "Replace References" that allows you to swap one field out for another all in one shot. 

In this example, I take you through the whole process. 

You could also apply this method when you simply want to swap out all existences of one field for another. 

For example, you want to change all used of Order Date to Ship Date. 

Easy peasy!

June 25, 2024

How to Create a 9-Box Matrix in Tableau

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In this video, I show you how to build a 9-box matrix. 

These are commonly used in talent management and HR to map a company's workforce along two dimensions, potential and performance. 

Each of these two dimensions is split up into three categories, low, medium, and high, depending on the score. 

For each employee performance is then plotted horizontally and potential is plotted vertically. From there, we summarize the number of employees that fall within each box. 


June 20, 2024

How to Simultaneously Highlight & Deselect with a Parameter Action in Tableau

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In this video, we’ll dive into an advanced technique to enhance your Tableau visualizations: simultaneously highlighting and deselecting marks using parameter actions. This is a great skill for making your dashboards more interactive and user-friendly. 

What You Will Learn:
- Highlight & Deselect Marks: Learn how to use parameter actions to highlight selected marks while deselecting others, improving the clarity and focus of your data stories.
- Dynamic Labeling: Discover how to label ONLY the selected bar, making it easier to convey specific insights without cluttering your visualizations.

Tutorial Highlights:
1. Introduction to Parameter Actions: A brief overview of what parameter actions are and why they are powerful tools in Tableau.
2. Step-by-Step Guide: Follow along as I demonstrate how to set up parameter actions to achieve the simultaneous highlight and deselect effect.
3. Labeling Techniques: Learn the trick to dynamically label only the selected mark, enhancing the readability and professionalism of your dashboard.

By the end of this tutorial, you will have the skills to create more interactive and visually appealing Tableau dashboards that can captivate and inform your audience effectively.

June 4, 2024

Find Red Flags in Your Data in ONLY 5 MINUTES with Control Charts

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If you like this video, you'll love learning from me 4 hours per week in Next-Level Tableau. Join here.

Control charts are one of the best charts you can use for identifying outliers in a series of measurement. So what are they?

Control charts are used to monitor whether a process is performing consistently over time. It's basically a line graph that tracks data points collected at specific intervals, but with three key additions:

1. 𝗔𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲: This horizontal line represents the average performance of the process based on historical data.
2. 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗹 𝗹𝗶𝗺𝗶𝘁𝘀: These are two additional horizontal lines, one above and one below the center line. They are typically 2-3 standard deviations from the average, but can be whatever number of standard deviations work for your situation. These limits reflect your "stable" range.
3. 𝗢𝘂𝘁𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗿 𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: Color-coding the outlier marks helps you more easily identify the problems.

The line chart you create will help you see if measurements fall within the control limits. 

- If they do, it suggests the process is in control. 
- If they fall outside the control limits, it indicates a potential problem that needs additional analysis.

Control charts are widely used for quality control purposes (especially in manufacturing), but they can be applied to any process where you want to track performance over time. 

Download the workbook here.

May 26, 2024

How to Create a Barcode Chart in Tableau

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Like dot strip plots, barcode charts are good for displaying all the data in a table, they work best when highlighting individual values.

May 25, 2024

How to Calculate Year over Year Change in Tableau

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With Level of Detail Expressions, calculating year over year change is simple with the 7 steps.

How to Create a Dot Strip Plot in Tableau

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Dot strip plots help visualize the frequency and distribution of small, discrete data sets. Dots placed in order on a strip are a space-efficient method of laying out ranks across multiple categories.

May 15, 2024

#MakeoverMonday 2024 Week 20 - Exporting Freedom, One Bullet at a Time

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I struggled mightily with this week's #MakeoverMonday. My goals was to replicate the original visualization by Bloomberg.

I knew I need to create path to connect the US at the center to each country.

I wanted to make the US the center of the of the map.

Sounds simple, right? I made it way harder than it needed to be.
  • I overthought the data prep.
  • I forgot how to create the paths.
  • I couldn't get the math right to offset the longitude.

The coloring and labeling was straightforward for me.

Adding the US as a circle in the middle was pretty simple.

To overcome the problems I faced
  • I looked at a previous visualization I created using paths.

  • I opened the workbook and the data to see the configuration.
  • I replicated that set up by adding a second set of records to the data set.
  • Viewers on the livestream helped me figure out the math to offset the longitude.

The simplest way to explain the location of each country is to think of the lat/lon for the US as 0,0. Then you compare that to the lat/lon for every other country to create the offset.

I got there in the end. What do you think? Was the juice worth the squeeze?

Click the image below to access the viz. 


May 3, 2024

How to Make Your Cycle Plots Actionable in Tableau

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Cycle plots are a fantastic way to identify seasonality in a data set. And you can make them even more useful by adding indicators for whether they are above or below the average.

Here's how you can do that in Tableau in only 2 minutes.

Like this? You'll love Next-Level Tableau. Learn more at nextleveltableau.com.

May 1, 2024

Which chart should you use for your analysis?

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Over on Tableau Public, Judit Bekker create this fantastic directory of charts to help you pick the one that's most appropriate for your analysis.

Check it out below.

How to Create a Cycle Plot in Tableau

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A cycle plot is used to display cyclical patterns or trends over time, such as days of the week or months, to identify patterns, compare groups, and visualize seasonality in data.

April 30, 2024

How I Create a Unit Histogram in Tableau

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A unit histogram is a chart that shows the distribution of data points across a series of bins of a measure.

Unlike a traditional histogram that uses bars, a unit histogram consists of a set of marks, each representing a member of a dimension. 

In this example, our final result is a unit histogram showing the distribution of states by their average sales.

If you like this, you'll love Next-Level Tableau. You get over 175 hours of live training with me, 130+ on-demand videos, workshops, office hours, workbooks, data sets, lots of new videos each year, any new courses I create, and a great Community.

Get more info and sign up today at nextleveltableau.com.

April 29, 2024

How to Create a Comet Chart in Tableau

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A comet chart is a type of visualization used to display the trajectory of data points over time. 

They’re often used to compare one time period to another to see the direction of the change.

The tail starts at the first time period and grows like a comet to the second period.

April 26, 2024

Jumpy Curvy Things in Tableau

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I received a request to teach how to build a jump plot during Next-Level Tableau office hours. The idea was to recreate this visualization that I created for Makeover Monday back in 2018.

The problem, though, was that the data preparation was done in Alteryx, which I no longer have a license for. Thanks for a member of NLT that had an Alteryx license, we were able to decode what the workflow was doing.

Then, in office hours, we recreated the data prep in Tableau Prep before building the visualization in Tableau. Download the Prep flow here. Download the workbook below.

This is just one example of one thing learned as a member of NLT. Sign up today and I guarantee you'll become a Tableau expert.

April 25, 2024

The ULTIMATE Guide to Custom Visualizations in Tableau

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Here's the ultimate guide to custom visualizations in Tableau. Each chart contains a link to a tutorial so you can build it too.

I rarely use these charts on a day-to-day basis, but they are a fantastic way to build your technical skills.

Have you used any of these in a business context? Click on the image to view on Tableau Public.

April 24, 2024

20 Dashboard Design Best Practices

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Understanding best practices when designing dashboards is critical for ensuring they are used, useful, and help drive the business forward.

April 23, 2024

How to Create Rounded Bar Charts in Tableau

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A rounded bar chart is a type of bar chart where the ends of the bars are rounded instead of being straight. They create a more visually appealing and softer look to the chart.

April 21, 2024

How to Create Custom Date Hierarchies in Tableau

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Custom date hierarchies are one of the most underutilized features in Tableau. They allow you to define specific drill-downs not automatically available.

For example, you may want to allow your users to only drill-down from Year to Month.

April 20, 2024

The What, Why, and How of Custom Dates in Tableau

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Custom dates allow users to define the level of granularity and format of the date field according to their specific needs based on existing date fields in the data.

They are useful when you want to restrict drill-down options or create sets for specific date ranges.

Here's how to create them.

Why you should build a Tableau Public profile

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If I were starting now, these are the 3 reasons I would build a Tableau Public profile. 

1. To build your skills 
2. To develop your career 
3. To be a part of a community 

I covered this and a lot more in this week's Newbie TUG. 

The slides are below the video. If the video doesn't start at my talk, click here.


Building a Tableau Public Profile by Andy Kriebel

April 18, 2024

How to Create a Donut Chart in Tableau

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Make your data delicious with this Tableau donut chart tutorial. 

Donut charts are a common way of showing part-to-whole data – but be aware that it’s difficult to accurately compare the size of the segments. 

They are similar to a pie chart – but the centre can be a good way of making space to include more information about the data (e.g., total).

Which chart would you like to show?

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Beginners and advanced designers alike get stuck deciding which chart is right for their data. Next time you're stuck, try this chart guide by Damola Ladipo.

Check it out on Tableau Public here. Click the image below for a hi-res version to print.

April 16, 2024

How to Create a Bar-in-Bar Chart in Tableau

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A bar in bar chart is a type of chart in that allows for comparisons between two measures. It involves placing one measure as the main bar and another measure as a smaller bar inside the main bar. 

This creates a visual representation, similar to a thermometer, showing the progress or comparison between the two measures. 

April 13, 2024

25 Example to Help You Master Calculations in Tableau

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I guarantee that if you study these 25 examples, you'll be on your way to mastering Tableau calculations. 

Credits to Sara Hamdoun and Fuad Ahmed.

 

How to Create a Proportional Stacked Bar Chart in Tableau

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Proportional stacked bar charts are a good way of showing the size and proportion of data at the same time.

April 10, 2024

How to make sense of ANY data set

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Demystify ANY data set by answering 5 simple questions:

  1. When?
  2. Where?
  3. Which?
  4. Who?
  5. Why?

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P.S. Newsletter subscribers get a deeper dive into each of these for FREE when they sign up. Go to andykriebel.com to get yours. 

11 Ways to Compare Two Measures

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I don't believe in complexity in data visualization. I stick with simple charts when you needs to compare measures to add context.

Tableau workbook here.

April 9, 2024

The Ultimate Tableau Date Calcs Cheat Sheet

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This date calcs cheat sheet by Luke Stanke is all you'll ever need to master date calculations in Tableau. Includes visual examples that highlight exactly how each calc works.

Simply click the calc you need, copy the calculation, paste into your calculation, and swap out the date field.

How to Create a Floating Bar Chart in Tableau

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A floating bar chart is similar to a Gantt chart, except it shows the range of two data points instead of two dates.

April 8, 2024

How to Create an Enclosed Dot Plot in Tableau

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An enclosed dot plot is similar to a barbell charts except the line connecting the dots surrounds the dots.

April 7, 2024

How to Create a Barbell Chart in Tableau

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A barbell chart is a dot plot that shows two or more points and also connects those points to display the range.

April 6, 2024

How to Create a Histogram in Tableau

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A histogram visualizes the distribution of data over a continuous interval. Each bar represents the frequency at each bin.

18 Ways to Visualize Bar Charts in Tableau

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The SECRET to never choosing the wrong chart...the Bar Chart! Here are 18 options for your next bar chart.

Tableau tutorial and workbook here.

How to Create a Heatmap in Tableau

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A heat map is a good way of showing the patterns between 2 categories of data. They use color to encode the intensity of the relationships in the matrix.

April 2, 2024

60 Ways to Visualize Time Series Data in Tableau

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I don't believe in creating fancy visualization to get attention. I prefer easy to understand. Here's my complete list of 60 unique ways to visualize time series data.

Learn to build them here. View the workbook here. Download it on Gumroad here (for a small fee).

April 1, 2024

#WatchMeViz: Can viral infections be cured with antibiotics?

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I'm really surprised, though maybe I shouldn't be, about the results from a poll of 1206 Americans by KFF. They asked a simple question: 

"Can viral infections usually be cured by antibiotcs, or not? Or do you not know enough to say?"

According to the results, women know better than men, as do adults with higher incomes and higher levels of education.

I took on this data set for Watch Me Viz for Makeover Monday week 14. Check out my final viz here. There's an image below the video.


March 27, 2024

8 Reasons Power BI isn't "FREE"

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Too many IT leaders are ignorant. They are blinded by the allure of Power BI being "free". It's not.
Why I don't use Power BI by Andy Kriebel

What are joins?

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I bet you didn't know how easy it is to understand the 4 types of joins. Let me show you...
Fundamentals of Joins by Andy Kriebel

March 11, 2024

#MakeoverMonday 2024 Week 11 - Housing Vacancies in America

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This week I decided to turn Makeover Monday into a Workout Wednesday of sorts. I wanted to try a technique I haven't used in a while...showing elements on either side of a rank and filtering out the rest.

Want to give it  a try? Get the data here.

Requirements:
  1. Size - 1000x475
  2. Max 4 containers; no tiled containers allowed
  3. Filter out Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico
  4. Clicking on a MSA in the map highlights the MSA in the map and bar chart and changes the MSAs that are displayed in the bar chart
  5. The bar chart shows the rank of the MSA for the metric selected.
  6. There should always be 11 bars (though I didn't test the lowest rank).
  7. The label on the end of the bar and in the map reflect the formatting of the measure selected (i.e., either whole numbers or a percentage to one decimaal).
  8. Include an option to change the measure and to change the number of MSAs on the map.
  9. Create a mobile view
  10. NO LODS!

Have fun! 

March 8, 2024

Visualizing Time Series Data in Tableau

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Last night I was invited to speak at the Chicago Tableau User Group about visualizing time series data. Other than spatial data, time series data is my favorite to visualize. 

There seem to be endless methods for making time series data useful for analysis. Check out this video for 60ish ways to visualize time.

I had a 20 minute slot to present and, of course, I ran over time. I seem to do this with every session I run lately. Be it training for Next-Level Tableau, presenting at events, or running a livestream, I get into a groove and don't want to stop.

I was able to create 14 vizzes in 20+ minutes. I added an extra in this workbook to make the dashboard format nicely.

Click on the image below to download the workbook and dissect it. Get the data here to follow along. 

Have fun! 

March 6, 2024

What does Level of Detail mean in Tableau?

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If you’re serious about learning Tableau, you must understand the level of detail of the view. Another way to think about it is the level of granularity.

This is essential for ensuring you know the aggregations that Tableau will perform as this will impact your analysis.

Here's a guide to help you:

March 5, 2024

11 Steps to Create KPIs & Sparklines in the Same Sheet in Tableau

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Want to cut the number of sheets you need in your KPI dashboard in half? These 11 simple steps will get much closer.

Steal the calcs to speed up your work.

P.S. If you like tips like this, remember to follow me on LinkedIn so you're notified about everyting I post. Content curated just for you, 3 times daily.

February 26, 2024

How I Create a Beeswarm Chart in Tableau

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Beeswarm charts a one method of showing distributions in a data set. I show you how to create one in this #MakeoverMonday livestream.

Download the workbook  |  Download the data



January 8, 2024

Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Beautiful Bump Chart in Tableau

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We all create charts we know *could* be better.

Here's how to make your next bump chart look like magic 🤯

Tableau is incredible for creating bump charts...

But 99% use shortcuts which don't look great. 

Here's my secret:

It all comes down to the small details.
Each step has to be done right to get the view you want.

Most people don't follow these steps.

And even more don't know how to make it look great...

I'm going to show you how.

In this tip, I give you specific step-by-step instructions to get your bump chart to look just right.

👀 Do you want a copy of my viz? 👀

You got it!

Send a DM on LinkedIn saying CHART MAGIC! and I'll send you a PDF of the instructions AND the workbook for you to use for FREE.