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!

Learn About Tableau

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