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February 12, 2025

Advanced Calendar Heat Maps in Tableau (No More Workarounds!)

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Tired of clunky calendar heat maps in Tableau? You’re not alone. 

Traditional methods (discrete & continuous headers) just don’t cut it. But what if you could build the perfect calendar heat map—one that’s dynamic, clean, and fully customizable?

In this tutorial, you’ll learn:
✅ The problems with traditional calendar heat maps
✅ How to build the ultimate calendar heat map using map layers
✅ Create a fully interactive dashboard with perfect formatting

Download the workbook (interact below) & data source.

P.S. Want to master Tableau and stand out in your career with Next-Level Tableau

Next-Level Tableau is a community-based membership that gives you exclusive, real-time access to live classes with me, a Tableau Visionary Hall of Fame member. 

These sessions teach you how to:

✅ Master advanced Tableau skills
✅ Solve business problems through visualization
✅ Think like an analyst—so that you can deliver impactful dashboards and confidently demonstrate your value to your boss.

What sets NLT apart is the vibrant, supportive community of like-minded Tableau developers, where you’ll build lasting connections, exchange ideas, and get help when you need it—so that you can stay motivated, continuously improve, and never feel stuck or isolated in your Tableau journey.

📊 Take your Tableau skills to the next level today!

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.

April 6, 2024

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.


March 31, 2022

#B2VB 2022/W3 - Olympic Medal Tracker

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If you're not participating in the Back to Viz Basics community project yet, you should be. It's all about creating effective, simple charts, which is exactly what you need to be able to do before you build anything fancy. This will definitely help you master data visualization best practices.

For week 3, the objective was to build a text table of Olympic medal counts. Sounds simple, but unfortunately, building good looking tables isn't one of Tableau's strengths. 

I also started the #WatchMeViz livestreams again. You can find all of them on this playlist. Thank you to those that attended live and asked good questions and left thoughtful comments. Below is the livestream as well as my final viz.

Until next week...


August 9, 2021

#MakeoverMonday 2021 Week 32 - Mortality Rates in England and Wales

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I couldn't find too much to do with this week's data set, so I ended up with some simple BANs and line charts that take the original and reorganize them a bit to make them more clear.

Resources:

  1. Data set - https://data.world/makeovermonday/2021w32
  2. Chart Guide - https://chart.guide/
  3. Final Viz - https://bit.ly/mm2021w32


August 4, 2021

#MakeoverMonday Week 31 - Bicycle Collisions in London

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This week's data set was pretty straightforward. During #WatchMeViz I iterated through some maps, including joining to spatial files for London, and also lots of time series charts. Below are links to the resources, the video, and the final viz.

Resources:


July 12, 2021

#MakeoverMonday 2021 Week 28 - COVID Vaccination Rates by Ethnicity and Age in England

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How can ethnic groups be treated differently when it comes to the COVID vaccine? It's terrible! And this data from NHS England clearly demonstrates the racial divisions that exist in this country.

I'm not sure what happened during the recording, but it got split into two parts. Both are below.

Resources:


Thanks for tuning in! Interact with the viz by clicking on the image below or here.



June 28, 2021

#MakeoverMonday Week 26 - How Popular Is Your Birthday?

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The original visualization this week was superb. I don't think what I created was better, but I did come up with a slightly different take and I showed how to build a marginal histogram. I also failed trying to create a starburst chart (I'm going to give it another go).

Resources:

June 22, 2021

#MakeoverMonday 2021 Week 25 - Stop & Search in England & Wales

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Tough topic this week, stop & search by race. What really stuck out to me is how much more likely anyone with black ethnicity of any type is to be stopped and searched. No one can tell me there isn't racism in the UK.

Resources:
  1. Final Viz (and below)
  2. Data Set
  3. How to Create a Trellis Chart
  4. Data Viz Catalogue


November 16, 2020

#MakeoverMonday Week 46: The Growth of Internet Ad Spend - 2020 vs 2012

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Thanks for attending #WatchMeViz (link) for #MakeoverMonday Week 46. I enjoy the commentary and ideas you provide along the way. I hope you're learning something as well.

The topic this week was the switch in advertising revenue to the internet.

In the video, I first reviewed the initial visualization and talked about what works and what does. I then iterated through 17 different methods for visualizing the data, before settling on the one below which was inspired by Ellen Blackburn's viz about eligible free school meals and educational attainment (link)

RESOURCES

  1. Data Set - https://data.world/makeovermonday/2020w46
  2. Chart Guide - https://chart.guide/

Click on the image below for the interactive version.

June 19, 2020

How to Get Your Data from Strava to Tableau

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UPDATE: If you prefer video tutorials, there is now one on my YouTube channel here. The steps to get the links into the Simple Mass Downloader are done more efficiently in the video. There are several steps removed from the Excel and link uploads that are listed in the blog.



For a while now, I've been using this process for getting my data from Strava into Tableau like this:
  1. Download the data from Strava
  2. Prep it with Alteryx
  3. Visualize it in Tableau

In this post, I will outline the steps for getting your data from Strava into Tableau. I have also created a template with some sample vizzes for you to use. Download it from Tableau Public here.

I started revamping the process after wanting to create a small multiple view of all of my activities like this:


When I first started creating these, I took a process based on R and converted it into a workflow in Alteryx. This worked great, but there were two main drawbacks:

  1. My Alteryx workflow was a mess (I tinkered with it every month).
  2. Each of the routes would be adjusted to fit perfectly in a square.

This second problem meant that the routes were not scaled correct according to the curvature of the Earth. I then saw that Andy Cotgreave reached out to Ken Flerlage for help. They've written about their process here. Great! However, the calculations on this process make rendering the maps in Tableau very, very slow. Like REALLY slow.

That's where Alteryx comes in. I pushed all of the data processing into Alteryx, export each route as a single spatial object and every renders super fast. So if you're interested in getting all of your data out of Strava and visualizing it in Tableau, this process is for you. It does require Alteryx, but you could replicate the process in R.


TOOLS REQUIRED

  • A Strava account - NOTE: Make sure you are logged in to Strava throughout these steps.
  • Alteryx Designer
  • Tableau Desktop
  • Simple Mass Downloader Chrome extension

GET THE DATA FROM STRAVA

Step 1 - Login to Strava, click on your profile icon on the upper right, choose Settings.


Step 2 - On the My Profile page, click on My Account.


Step 3 - Scroll to the bottom and click on the Get Started button in the Download or Delete Your Account section.


Step 4 - In step 2, choose Request Your Archive. Don't do anything else on this page.




Step 5 - Check your email in a few minutes. When it arrives, click on the Download Archive button in the email.



Step 6 - Unzip the file that downloads. Open the folder that's created and you should see something like this.

The activities folder contains all of the raw files, but these won't all be in the same format, which means they're useless. The ONLY file we need is activities.csv. Open the CSV in Excel.

Step 7 - The only column we need in the file is the Activity ID column.


Delete all columns except Activity ID.


Step 8 - Insert a column to the left of Activity ID. I name it URL, but call it whatever you prefer. Then in cell A2 enter this formula: 

=CONCAT("https://www.strava.com/activities/",B2,"/export_gpx")

Then copy it down for all rows. This create a link to each activity in GPX format. If some of the activities don't have location data, don't worry about it. Those will simply not download in the process.

Choose the URL column header (the "A" above URL), choose Copy, then Paste Special => Values. Then delete column B (the column with the activity ids).



DOWNLOAD EACH ACTIVITY

Step 1 - Add the Simple Mass Downloader Chrome extension.


A new tab will open with a tutorial if you're interested to learn how it works.

Step 2 - Click on the extension button and you should see this screen.



Step 3 - Click on the hamburger on the right and choose Import URLs from local file.



Step 4 - Import the activities.csv file and the URLs will upload. This loads all of the files into the queue on the Download List tab. Choose the Select All box and they should all be highlighted.



Step 5 - Click on Start Selected and you'll see a bunch of files start downloading very quickly. Again, some of them will error out if the activity doesn't have location data. The files that download will have a green check next to them.



Phew! That might seem like a lot, but once you do it a couple times, the process is really quick.

Fantastic...all of the files are now downloaded. Onto Alteryx we go. 

ALTERYX PROCESS

Step 1 - Download the Strava Route Maps workflow from the Alteryx Gallery and open it in Alteryx Designer. If you can't download it from the Gallery, I have it on Google Drive here.


The Strava icon is a simple macro that will import all of the GPX files in the Directory you specify when you run the app. 

The workflow is split into four parts:

  1. Import the data, strip out the parts we need, then create points and lines.
  2. Normalize the data based on the calcs from Ken Flerlage, turn them into lines (one mark for each route rather than hundreds of point for each route) and export as a Tableau extract.
  3. For each point, calculate the distance, climb, etc. and extract all of the points.
  4. Take each of the points and turn them into lines.

Neither part 3 nor part 4 above normalize the data into squares. These are simply all of the data for each route.

Step 2 - Run the workflow as an App by clicking on the magic wand next to the Run button.


Step 3 - Choose the folder that contains all of the GPX files from the Simple Mass Downloader output. And click Finish.


This will generate three Tableau extracts that will load into the same directory as the GPX files. The workflow extracts them as TDE because Hyper files don't support polygons. Even though these aren't polygons, it makes me more comfortable that Tableau will read the files correctly.

Success!


Click the Clear button and then the OK button. Otherwise all three files will open in Tableau, which we don't want.

We're all done with Alteryx. Onto Tableau.


TABLEAU PROCESS

I've created a template for you to get started with. Download it from my Tableau Public profile here. Once you have done that, follow these steps.

Step 1- Open Tableau and right-click on each data source and pick Edit Data Source.


Step 2 - Click on the carrot next to the data source name and choose Edit Connection.


Step 3 - Navigate to the data source that downloaded from the Alteryx workflow. It will have the same name.



Step 4 - Go back to your worksheets and everything should update automatically. If not, right-click on the data source name and choose Refresh.

Step 5 - Customize the views as you see fit. That's it!

Here are the vizzes that I have included in the template.










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