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.

The second session we had at the DS today was taught by Laine Caruzca and she showed us how to build a radial chart in Tableau based on this viz she created for Makeover Monday week 20:


I'd never built a radial chart from scratch before, so I was excited to learn to build a second new chart type today. In Laine's tutorial, she used the Custom SQL option that's available in the Legacy data connector in Tableau for Windows. However, there's no custom sql option on a Mac, so I decided to create the data structure using Tableau Prep.

Download the Flow here

This is a pretty straightforward workflow. You split the data into parts to create the start and end points, then union them back together, along with some cleanup along the way.

Laine provided all of the details of the table calcs and the bin needed to create the curves, so I follow her steps using the Arctic Sea Ice Extent data from Makeover Monday week 15. That worked rather perfectly!

From there it was on to the polish. I love Pablo Gomez's style, so I used this radial chart viz of his as inspiration for the overall design, and then I used the wording from Arpit Arora's Makeover Monday viz about the same topic to help frame the messaging.

If you don't participate in Workout Wednesday, you're missing a great opportunity to learn. For week 24 2018, Ann Jackson challenged us to also use Tableau Prep. The toughest part of the data prep was getting the second purchase date for a customer. First is easy. The trickiest part is that you can't sort data in Prep, so you have to do some workarounds to get what you need.

In this video, I should you how I approached returning the first and second purchase dates for a customer, include some summary measures, then bring them both back together into a single table for visualizing in Tableau.

Ann is back for Workout Wednesday week 24. The full list of requirements can be found here. Personally, I like how this week's challenge included Tableau Prep. It's great to have an excuse to practice!

The high-level requirements:

1. Create a data set in Tableau Prep that returns the first and second order for each customer along with the sales, number of categories and number of products sold on that day. 
2. The data must be wide rather than tall. That is, you must have nine columns in total: Customer ID, two dates, two sales totals, two category counts, two product counts.
3. Create a dashboard with a scatterplot and two strip plots.
4. Float everything...YUCK!

Now that the manuscript of the Makeover Monday book (pre-order here) has been sent to the publisher, I'm going to do my best to get back into a rhythm with weekly tips. This week, I'm going to show you how I used Tableau Prep to prepare the data for my Makeover Monday viz this week. It involves splitting eight columns into two sets of four, renaming fields, pivoting the data, and then unioning it all back together.

You can download the flow here.