Why Vizioneer?

My photo
Atlanta, Georgia, United States
The "Vizioneer" comes from mashing two words that have shaped my world for most of my adult life - Engineer and [data] Visualizations (or Vizes to those who know what's up). Graduating from first from Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, followed by Georgia Tech with my Bachelors and Masters in Civil Engineering, all of which taught me to think through anything and everything - problem solving, "engineering" solutions, teaching to the "ah ha" moments - is what I love to do. In 2010 that investigative, engineering mindset intersected a job change and a plunge into the world of Data Analysis. In the search for the next great thing I stumbled on to a data visualization and dashboarding product called Tableau software and things just took off. So now I guess you could call me that engineer with the sweet data visualizations - or just "The Vizioneer" :)

In 2013, I joined the incredible team at Slalom, focusing on Tableau and it's been an amazing experience. Recently in 2014, I was honored and humbled to receive Tableau's highest recognition of being named a Tableau Zen Master. Follow along to see what happens next :)

Friday, April 4, 2014

Day 4: SharePoint Data

It's Friday! And it's springtime in Atlanta - aka heaven on earth.  It's beautiful here.  Wouldn't you love to go outside and enjoy a Braves game?  Opening day is Tuesday!  What's that you say?  You're busy pulling down your company's data that's up on SharePoint, manually putting it into Excel so you can do your Tableau dashboards?  Boy do I have just the trick for you!




While doing hacks and trick with data inside Tableau is awesome, sometimes it's even more important to know hacks and tricks to bring data automatically into Tableau.  And if your company is anything like mine, there's a solid amount of important data that makes up your company operations living right there on your SharePoint site.  The trick is getting the data from SharePoint straight into Tableau automatically.  This trick comes straight from Tableau, but I don't think many people know about it.  It's too cool for no one to be talking about it.

The linked article really walks you through the step by step of how and what to do.  I don't don't feel the need to repeat the whole thing, but I'll extend the trick by giving you a couple of ideas on some cool ways we've been able to implement this:


  • SharePoint is a cool technology from a collaboration standpoint.  Many people know that Tableau can be embedded on a SharePoint site (part of the cool integration that Tableau does).  How cool would it be to embed SharePoint list data right there on a SharePoint site?  People would think there was some sort of cool new add in to SharePoint 2014, and when they find out it's actually Tableau it will be a great conversation starter.  And that will help drive adoption and implementation of Tableau at your organization.
  • SharePoint host calendars.  On Day 1 I showed you how to make an interactive calendar in Tableau.  Coincidence?  I think not :)  Take that SharePoint calendar data to the next level with shapes and filters.  
  • Considering an office relocation? Maybe help others find co-workers to car pool with?  SharePoint may have all of the home addresses of each employee.  Tableau can geocode down to the zip code and map that data.  Or you could take it down to the actual street, and leverage an R server to get exact latitudes and longitudes for mapping.  Alteryx would be another solution for this.
  • Project status reports and timeline visualized in Tableau as gantt charts, points and KPIs.  The nitty gritty details of many of your company's most important projects is on SharePoint.  Grab the start date, milestone dates, and end dates, throw in some details on the status of a project as progress and you have an insightful and interactive look in to what a group is working on start to finish.
These are just a few of the many cool things that you can do once you start to harness SharePoint data in Tableau.

Is this something you're already doing at your company?  I'd love to hear some additional implementations of how this is being leveraged.  

Thanks again for checking out the blog!  We'll be posting all weekend so stop by and say hey!

Many thanks - 
Nelson 

6 comments:

  1. I've tried to connect to a SharePoint list using ODATA connector and have never had any success. I wish SharePoint List was actually a supported connector in Tableau.

    ReplyDelete
  2. same here, can not connect with odata it only works with basic auth enabled thats not good at all.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I agree that it's not the best option. If you have Excel 2010 or 2013, you can look into using Power Query to grab SharePoint Data. You would then connect to the Power Query Excel file just as you would a normal Excel file. The annoying part is that you'd probably have to open the Excel file and refresh the data manually (unless there's a trick I don't know about yet). Hope that helps!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Have you guys tried this out : http://community.tableausoftware.com/docs/DOC-5562 . This worked for me!!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Appreciative to you, for sharing those amazing expressive acknowledgments. As the reader of this blog, I'll try to do some an incentive in reacting; there's an uncommon game plan that you've crushed in articulating the fundamental goals, as you charmingly put it. Keep Sharing
    Tableau Online Training In India, USA, UK
    Tableau Online Training In Australia, Malaysia, Singapore.

    ReplyDelete
  6. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete