Author: johan@antichaos.nl

  • My Tableau Resources

    During my Datafam London presentation I briefly showed a slide with a screenshot of my RSS reader – my main source of inspiration on everything Tableau. Afterwards I have got several requests to share this list of website.

    Every time I stumble upon an interesting blog (or website with a feed) I add it to my Feedly account.

    For this post I have exported all these links, and I will update it regularly. If you want to share an interesting Tableau/Data/Data Visualization blog, please let me know and I will add (and follow) it!

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  • Drill Down in Tight Spaces

    A different way to make drill down possible/usable in a small sheet.

    Sometimes you don’t have all the space to do what you want.

    Or you are almost finished with a dashboard, and suddenly someone mentions: “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could drill down on this chart…” – but the sheet is just too small for another column. There are multiple ways so solve this issue – each with its own pros and cons. Viz-in tooltip (hard to read on larger drill-downs), hiding nearby sheets (tedious), enlarging the row-height (ugly when not drilled-down), misusing totals (even uglier), …

    In this article I describe a different solution – which definitely has its disadvantages, but can be useful in certain situations where the drill down functionality is important.

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  • Clean your BANs – 3 simple tips

    Three easy to implement tips on BANs: the Big Ass Numbers you put on top of your dashboard.

    BANs are a common and good way to display important figures. But while they are seemingly easy to implement, often they can be improved to make them more effective.

    [part of the ‘Datafam London 2024 – Deepcleaning your dashboard’ series]

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  • Line-chart: betters ways to compare years

    Line charts are one of the best and popular ways to show how data has developed over time. It’s a simple graph that is familiar to anyone, but the default generated can often be improved – either in Tableau, Excel or any other tool.

    In this blog post I want to show how a relative small change in a line chart can result in a big improvement.

    [part of the ‘Datafam London 2024 – Deepcleaning your dashboard’ series]

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  • Deep Cleaning Barcharts – part 2: Punctuated Bar Chart

    [part of the ‘Datafam London 2024 series]

    In part 1 we took a look at a basic bar chart, and ended with the lollypop chart. A fun chart with one major issue: the dot obfuscates the real datapoint.

    Punctuated Bar Chart

    One solution for it the Punctuated Bar Chart:
    We highlight the end of each bar, instead of enlarging the endpoint.

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  • Deep Cleaning Barcharts – part 1: the basics

    [part of the ‘Datafam London 2024 series]

    On DataFam 2024 in London I gave a presentation / workshop on deep cleaning dashboards.

    Why cleaning dashboards?

    • Make it look better ▶ Users want to use it
    • Less clutter on your dashboard ▶ Less clutter in your brain
    • Making your dashboard more actionable ▶ Focusing on what’s important.

    Dashboard cleaning is about: Removing, adding , re-arranging, and replacing stuff. In Tableau, it’s about: Table calculations, extra sheets, changing images, talking to users, being critical to yourself, … Is hard work – and a lot of fun!

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  • Top 2000 – Edition 2024: Snow Globes

    Top 2000 – Edition 2024: Snow Globes

    It’s my personal yearly end-of-December Christmas tradition: visualizing the Top 2000 hitlist of NPO Radio 2 (a Dutch national radio station).

    (you can also view the interactive visualization on Tableau Public)

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  • Christmas Movie Marathon using a Image based bar-chart

    Christmas Movie Marathon using a Image based bar-chart

    You can use to create your own Christmas Movie Marathon in Tableau using this dashboard!
    Based on the IMDB dataset ‘100 best Christmas movies of all time’ and some nice Tableau techniques you can determine which movies you want to watch this holiday.

    Start by entering the time you can spend on movies this holiday on Step 1 (from a couple of hours to several days), and then use step 2 to select all the movies you want to see during this time.
    Selections can be made on plot, but also runtime, genre and/or IMDB rating.

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  • Tableau ‘CountTo’ Extension

    Tableau ‘CountTo’ Extension

    Ever wanted to count up or down in Tableau?
    Now you can using the CountTo Viz Extension – for free!

    Count up and down inside Tableau

    Using this extension a dashboard will count up or down to a certain value.

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  • DataFam 2024 – London

    DataFam 2024 – London

    On the 11th and 12th of November of this year a complete new Tableau event was held in the center of London: DataFam 2024.

    Tableau Datafam 2024 London
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