Charles Schaefer’s session at TCC11 “Understanding and Working with Chart Types” included this decent flow diagram for choosing a chart type.  As the title says, it’s “A Thought-Starter”.  In other words, use it as a way to get you going down the right path.  This absolutely shouldn’t be taken as gospel; use your common sense.  For example:

1. Don’t ever create 3D area charts.  In fact, don’t ever create a 3D chart of ANY kind.
2. Never create a circular area chart
3. When created a stacked column chart don’t connecting the same colored bars with lines.

You can download the materials from Charles’ session here.  Included are a JPG and PDF version of the flow chart.

The flowchart originates from a blog post back in 2006 on The Extreme Presentation Method blog.  This blog, in turn, links to an interactive version of the chart chooser on Juice Analytics.  Although Tableau does a lot of this thinking for you, definitely check out the interactive tool to get a feel for some best practices and download the sample excel workbooks to quickly recreate these charts yourself.

TCC11 has passed, but everyone in attendance is anxious to get their hands on all of the great presentations, workbooks, etc.  For those of you not able to go, now I’m making them available to you as well.  Enjoy!

Session Materials
We packed the 2011 schedule with so many great sessions and learning opportunities that it may have been difficult to choose which session to attend. Visit our conference content page to watch the video recordings and download session materials. We will be adding more materials as they become available.

Save the Dates for our 2012 Tableau Customer Conference
European Customer Conference – April 2-4, 2012: W Hotel, Barcelona, Spain – apply to speak 
North American Customer Conference – November 5-8, 2012: Hilton Bayfront, San Diego, CA

Now that TCC11 has ended, the cat is out of the bag.  Tableau 7 is coming, and coming soon; it should be available for download around the beginning of the year.  Christian Chabot demoed many of the new features (but I’m sure not all) of Tableau 7 Desktop and Tableau 7 Server.

Some of my favorite new features (which we got to play with at TCC11) include:

• Filled maps!! (though they don’t go down to the zip code level)
• Wrapped maps
• Using parameters in filters, bins, reference lines/bands
• Improved statistics
• Lots of improvements to make the most prominent features more easily accessible

But there is one sad feature: the end of Null Island (this is the place where invalid geographic data are placed).

Here is what’s coming in Tableau Desktop:

Interested in learning what's coming in Tableau 7 Server? Click here.

Wednesday I received the feedback from my session/presentation at the 4th Tableau Customer Conference.  I had a blast presenting my case studies (The Holy Grail of Strategic Decision Making) and the interaction from the audience made it a wonderful experience.  I presented three case studies:

1. Collaborating for Value – An era of winning (this was an interactive analysis of retail prices by store by price point)
2. Customer Segmentation – Planning for growth and identifying opportunities
3. Penetration & Voids – Growing the business by finding the gaps

As has been my experience with presenting this same material both internally to our customer teams and externally to our buyers, the audience was able to gleam insights by “seeing” the data.  It’s a pretty cool experience when the data and the tool tell the story without you having to say a word.  Tableau makes it oh so easy.

What surprised me most about many of the customer presentations I attended was the lack of using Tableau live to show off their work.  Maybe my material lends itself more to that type of interactivity, but I would highly encourage anyone presenting findings from Tableau to use the tool live; you’ll get immediate feedback and you’ll be able to answer questions on the fly.

So how’d I do?  First up is a chart from Tableau that ranks all of the presentations, not only the customer presentations.  I’m the circle that the red line points to.  According to Tableau, this placed me in the top 3 of the customer presentations.

But how about the feedback on my presentation?  The response was overwhelmingly positive. I always get anxious waiting for the feedback!

I asked someone that was drinking a Pepsi to leave, jokingly of course, but I wonder if he gave me the “poor” ranking.  I tend to be a bit too directly and sarcastic and sometimes it’s taken the wrong way.  Or maybe it was someone that didn’t win the t-shirt I gave away.

Anyway, thanks to all of you that attended my session.  It was an awesome dialogue with the 75+ of you.  Hopefully we’ll catch up again in Europe.

Gratefully,

Andy

Four days!  Need I say more!  I can’t wait.  Tableau sent out the pocket agenda below so that we attendees can prepare ahead of time. 

Here are my plans for the breakout sessions (my intent is to attend those that I think will give me the most ideas to take back to work):

I hope to see you there.  Please find me and say hi.