Let's say you are giving a presentation that includes both slides and Tableau dashboards/charts. You'd rather not switch back and forth between applications. You'd prefer to have it all in Tableau.

It's super simple with Google Slides. In this tip, I show you how to embed a Google Slides presentation in a Tableau dashboard.

NOTE: The Google Slides presentation will not render on Tableau Public, but it will work if you download it and open it on your computer. Download the workbook here.

Today I had the incredible honor to talk to the English Institute of Sport and PGIR about data visualisation and why they should care about it...and I got to do it at the home of England Rugby.

Twickenham Stadium - Home of England Rugby

Twickenham is my home town, so I was able to walk to the stadium and rehearse my presentation along the way. The day started with a quick recap of their previous day, and this was the first chart I saw. "Oh boy, this might be a long day" was the first thought in my head. Deep breaths Andy. Deep breaths.


Surely Duncan did this on purpose for the benefit of the day. And yes, I did say something. From there, we went on a tour of the ground going through the tunnel onto the pitch.


Once on the pitch, we made our way to the coach's box.

View from the England coach's box

There, the team analysts talked to us about their gameday setup, where the coaches sit, how they pass information, etc. I found it fascinating how rugby teams use data in-game, right there with the coach, to make decisions, yet football doesn't allow any of that. How archaic!

We went back into the locker room to talk about the facilities available to the players and how they transmit all of their data post match.

England dressing rom

Team conditioning room

We then made our way upstairs so the analysts could learn about data visualisation. The rest of the day started with a talk by me titled

What is Data Visualisation? And Why Should You Care?

This was a new talk for me, with the focus on getting the team to understand the impact displaying data visually can have. I started with a couple of simple examples, we discussed why we do data analysis, talked about how they can get started, how to constructively evaluate visualisations, and a brief intro to the design process.

After this talk, four different analysts presented some of their work. Each table then took 10 minutes to discuss and write down what works and what could be improved based on what I had taught them. This worked like magic! I then gave my opinion in front of the whole group and suddenly a mere four hours after we started, we had a bunch of data viz snobs! I love it! It's so great to see the light bulb go off and especially to see them critiquing their own work.

The day concluded with a series of "appointments" where they could chat with me one-on-one about their work and get individual feedback. It reminded me a lot of the Tableau Doctor sessions at TC.

I made notes throughout the day and came up with a list of 10 key takeaways:

1. Include context - compared to what?
2. Where should the eye focus?
3. Highlight what's important
4. Be careful with stop light theme 
5. Include a call to action whenever possible
6. Pay attention to color usage
7. Know your audience
8. Does the audience now what to do next?
9. Effective chart types (boring is ok if it works)
10. White space is ok - it gives the viz room to breathe

Overall, an incredibly satisfying day. Thank you EIS for asking me to come! I'd be happy to do it again any time. For those interested, here's my presentation.

Today was my day to keynote Zens on Tour. Louis Archer asked me to present about Dear Data Two because he had heard about it during a recent London TUG. I was able to record most of it…for some reason it cut off near the end so apologies for that.

Below the view are the slides from the presentation. Enjoy!

You can find all of my Dear Data Two here and all of the combined work from Jeffrey and me here. I refer to four specific weeks in the presentation:

1. Week 34 - Urban Wildlife
   
2. Week 31 - Positive Feelings
   
3. Week 24 - Doors
   
4. Week 26 - Workspace
   

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I’m often asked how I got started with Tableau. How did I end up at Facebook? Why did I move to the UK to start the Data School? I gave a presentation at Surrey County Council yesterday about those exact questions, so I thought I’d share it with everyone. I hope you enjoy it!

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Today I had the pleasure of speaking at the Barclays Enabling Modern Analytics symposium. Nandu Govindankutty of Barclays did an amazing job organizing this event. He runs a charity called MADTA (Making A Difference Through Analytics) and focused this event on senior leaders from Charities and Social Enterprises.

Naturally I wanted to speak about the amazing work that The Data School did on the Connect2Help 211 project for the Tableau Foundation. Nandu also asked me to speak about my experience in data visualization and why I think data visualization is import in analytics.

I was able to record the presentation. You can watch the presentation below, view the slides and some of the visualizations I built during the talk.

    

I’m super excited to announce that Bryan Brandow and I will be setting the stage on fire at TCC14 in Seattle. This promises to be one of the best sessions you will ever experience at any TCC. If you thought our presentations in the past were good, you’re really in for a treat!

For those of you that don’t know Bryan, he’s basically the equivalent of a Tableau Zen Master for MicroStrategy. It’s been amazing working with him these past two years and seeing how he has taken to Tableau and the impact that change has had one his career and his passion. In addition to Bryan and myself, our entire Facebook Data Viz team will be in attendance and everyone is contributing topics to this presentation.

Synopsis:

"The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it -- often in the face of people who say it's impossible or are content with the status quo." - Mark Zuckerberg. 

In a Tit for Tat format much like Laurel and Hardy, Bryan and I will take you at breakneck speed through Facebook's incorporation of the "Hacker Way" into Tableau to do things no one thought was possible. We will be demonstrating some open source tools that we've built to make Tableau do things never thought possible and reveal a selection of top hacks that our teams have come up with that will help every Tableau user push their dashboards and servers to the limit.  This session will be wall to wall packed with laughs, learnings and “how’d they do that?” moments.  The pace will be fast, but step by step details of how you can implement everything you see will be available online immediately following the show.

We’re very excited and have some pretty big surprises in store :)

About Us:

I (Andy Kriebel) am a Tableau Zen Master as well as a Data Visualization Guru and Tableau expert at Facebook. My foray into data visualization began with building project management dashboards for teams in Vietnam in 2005. My passion exploded when I began using Tableau in 2007. Since then, my drive has led to a life-changing opportunity at Facebook. In August 2009 I launched this blog (vizwiz.blogspot.com), which provides examples of data visualization best practices, methods for improving existing work, and tips and tricks with Tableau Software.

Bryan Brandow is a Data Visualization Engineer at Facebook. He is the author of Bryan’s BI Blog (www.bryanbrandow.com), which is a popular blog for MicroStrategy hacks that has recently expanded to follow his journey into pushing the limits of what’s possible in Tableau as well. Bryan has been on an amazing journey from MicroStrategy to Tableau, which he speaks a bit about in his amazing blog post “Evolving BI”.

At Facebook we have complete freedom to find our own path, create a new direction, pursue our passions, and evangelize.  That’s basically what we’ve done with our Tableau implementation.  Given that, I created the graphic below, which I shared during our talk at the Gartner BI Summit on Tuesday. 

Picture this slide building along the way:

1. Hands-on training – We’ve established a robust weekly training schedule. 
   • Every other week we conduct a 90-minute intro class.  This includes getting everyone set up to use Tableau and introducing them to the basics of the tool.  This class is completely adhoc, meaning there’s no set script we go through.  This allows people to come to the class on multiple occasions with a good chance of learning something new.  What has really helped in this class is using our own data, making the training more applicable to the audience.
   • On the opposite weeks we have intermediate/advanced classes.  Topics include: Effective use of parameters, Dashboard actions, Optimizing extracts, Advanced chart types (my personal favorite to teach), and many more topics.  It’s a total geek out.
2. Forums & Groups – At Facebook, we dogfood our own products. Given that, Facebook Groups are a big part of how we communicate and collaborate.  If you’re not using Groups for your teams, you should.  In our Tableau Users Group, people post questions, problems, work they’ve done…really anything.  This has helped us build an extensive tribe.  Users don’t have to email any of the “core” team to get an answer.  I’ve really enjoyed seeing people that we’ve trained answering questions in the Group.
3. Consultation – Our team provides tool agnostic data visualization consulting.  We’re brought into projects to help evaluate current designs and suggest alternatives that communicate more effectively.  We also do a lot of prototyping.  For example, I may be given a sample data set of advertiser data and I’ll be asked to create some mockups for a product we’re developing.  We often use Tableau in this case because we can iterate incredibly quickly, even though Tableau might not be the tool that’s used for the final solution.
4. Contests – We’ve held an Iron Viz challenge (a minor success) and we spotlight great dashboards.  The winners are rewarded with swag.  People will do some amazing work when they know there’s a cool t-shirt up for grabs.
5. Hackathons – These are overnight events (typically 7pm-6am) that we use to create content and solve problems that we’ve always been intrigued by.  The only requirement is that you can’t work on your day-to-day projects.  This gives us an opportunity to do things like learn how to build hub-and-spoke diagrams like my personal two degrees of separation friend map. 
   
   As a side note, we did a live demo of building this friend map in 45 seconds, including animating it to see how my network has grown over time.  This map shows that I can visit almost any country in the world and I’m likely to at least be able to contact a friend of a friend.

I hope our implementation helps you make your BI program a success.

A colleague sent me this presentation on The Future of Mobile by Henry Blodget, the CEO & Editor of Business Insider.  Since Mr. Blodget gave the presentation, I can only assume that he approved the content, charts and graphs, though I doubt he actually created them.

I’m incredibly disappointed and surprised that Mr. Blodget would put his name to this presentation.  Not only is he the CEO, but he’s the EDITOR too.  There are so many charts that communicate poorly that I stopped counting.  You’ll find area charts (lots of them), stacked bar charts, pie charts, etc.  He should be embarrassed.  He should know better as an editor.

Maybe if enough of us leave Mr. Blodget feedback on his blog post, then he and his company will finally begin producing good work.  Shouldn’t we expect more from such a reputable company?

Or maybe he should meet with the folks at The New York Times, who continually pump out high quality content.

Namit Raisurana delivered an incredible presentation at TCC12 in San Diego.  I may be biased as a Facebook employee, however, his session was, without a shadow of a doubt, THE BEST customer presentation I’ve seen in the three conferences I’ve attended. 

Watch the full presentation below.  Enjoy!

Video streaming by Ustream

Monday night I had the honor of running a training session for the LA Tableau User Group.  You can download the presentation and Tableau workbook here.

One of the features of Tableau that I showed them was a PowerPoint presentation embedded in a Tableau dashboard.  I use this technique quite often as it allows me to stay in one tool, thereby negating the need to flip back and forth to PowerPoint.

In this blog post, I will review the steps to use this functionality.   

This example assumes you are using Google Docs to host your presentation.  This technique also works with presentations hosted on SharePoint.  Any other web-based presentation solution should work as well.

Step 1 – Create a new dashboard in Tableau

Step 2 – Navigate to your presentation on the web and open it


Step 3 – In Google Docs, click on Start Presentation


Step 4 – Click on the URL to highlight it, right-click and choose Copy


Step 5 – Go back to Tableau and drag the Web Page object onto the blank dashboard


Step 6 – Once you drop the Web Page object onto the dashboard, the Edit URL window appears.  Paste the URL for your presentation (from Step 4) and click OK.


That’s it!  Your presentation is now embedded within a Tableau dashboard.


If you don’t like the black space to either size of the presentation, the optimal size for the window (assuming you’re using a presentation from Google Docs) is 792 x 600.


Give it a shot.  I bet you’ll use this over and over again.

Another great TDWI webinar today: “Effective presentation of analytical results” by Jonathan Koomey. Much of the content will be review for those that have read books by Edward Tufte and Stephen Few (many of the examples used were taken from Show Me the Numbers), but it’s always good to hear someone else’s take on effective presentations.  My key takeaways:

• Know your audience - Think about what your audience cares about, and express your results in those terms
• Don’t forget the decision maker
• Use structured storytelling to present the key results
• Document your work (results & methodology) so that others can recreate it
• Break up graphs and tables into two categories
  – Those that give you insights
  – Those that help you tell your story to others
• Charts and figures must focus on the data
• Improving poor visualizations is a great way to teach best practices
  – Even simple changes can make a huge difference in communication
• My favorite quote: “Data are dull only when chosen poorly and presented badly”

Download the presentation here or read it below.

UPDATE (11/11/2011): The webinar video is now available for replay. Watch it here.

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!

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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

The next ATUG meeting will be November 17 @ 1PM ET

Who - All ATUG members and guests
What – The November in person hands on meeting
Where – Coca-Cola - 2 Coca Cola Plaza, Atlanta, GA 30313, USA-G

Important – You must check-in with security and tell them you are there for the Atlanta Tableau User Group meeting. They will then call me to come get you. I will have people in the lobby to help usher you to the room.

Plan to arrive at least 15 minutes early

RSVP – http://www.tableausoftware.com/usergroups/atlanta-nov17-11

Agenda:

1. Tableau Customer Conference Presentation – The Holy Grail of Strategic Decision Making (Andy Kriebel, Coca-Cola)

2. Training – Iron Viz Challenge: Create a beautiful viz with unfamiliar data in less than 30 minutes (David Newman, CSE Inc.)

3. Open forum –

• Tableau Customer Conference feedback, highlights, etc.
• December meeting – location, time, agenda

-- This will be a hands on session - Bring your laptop and Tableau with you --

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