Day 5: Aerial Imagery in Maps

My former life as a Civil Engineer means that by default I like maps - and I do.  I actually think they are the most contextually dense data visualization that exists (so glad you asked!).  That's why I love this next trick - simple, easy, and really cool.  It's time for Aerial Imagery in Maps!

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So if you're going to do any serious mapping in Tableau, there one name you have to know: Allan Walker, Tableau Zen Master of all things mapping, and Business Intelligence Analyst for Utah State University.  Check out his website They Walked Together or follow him on Twitter to see some amazing mapping in Tableau.  

So I've tried to figure out how to bring in aerial imagery for years, and just recently found how to do it from this post on Allan's blog.  But before you can leverage that, let make sure you know how to leverage a WMS server in Tableau.  Back to the SuperStore Data...

In a new workbook double click "City" and you should get a map that looks like this:

Now click on the Map menu and head to WMS Servers:

Select add and you'll put the url of the WMS in this box:

This is where you can now use either of the links that Allan provided in his blog post.  I'm going to use the NAIP one as it's got better nationwide coverage.  Here's the URL:
http://raster.nationalmap.gov/ArcGIS/services/Orthoimagery/USGS_EDC_Ortho_NAIP/ImageServer/WMSServer? 

Once it's added, close those windows and select the Map menu again.  You should now see the new WMS server map on there (if you used my link, it will have NAIP at the end).  Select that new map and you should now see something like this:

Wa-la Aerial Imagery!  Zoom in to get the full effect.  Here's NYC:

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Pretty cool, huh?  Y'all be sure to thank Zen Master Walker before you leave.  Thanks for stopping by!

Nelson

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!

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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 

Day 3: Dual Axis Maps - Filled and Points

It was a faithful day a little less than three years.  I was asked to pick a dashboarding software and in an afternoon I downloaded Tableau, Qlik, and Spotfire.  I had to deal with a lot of geospatial data and I quickly determined that Tableau had the best native mapping capabilities of the three.  The rest, as they say, is history.  Looking back, it was probably one of the best decisions of my life - at least it's working out so far :)

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Ah mapping. It's simple, it's easy, often times a double click away.  But there are occasions when we need to take mapping to the next level.  So let's dig in.

The business problem is that the US is broken into four regions based on state, and the end user wants to look at profitability by city.  Either one of those maps is pretty quick and easy to make in Tableau.  Problem is they want to be able to look at both region by state and profitability by city at the same time.  Dual axis maps to the rescue!

To start, let's show how to make each map individually, and then we'll bring them together.  Regions by state is up first.  We'll be using the Superstore dataset again today.  On a blank sheet start by double clicking "State".  Tableau knows that this is geospatial data (as evidenced by the globe next to the word "State"), so double clicking automatically brings up a map with points.  Change the chart type to a filled map, drop "Region" on the colors shelf  (I switched to Green-Orange 6 Palette), and boom:

I'll duplicate this sheet and start charging after profitability by city.  I'll start by hitting the "+" on state to take the next step down on the location hierarchy to city.  I'll ok the warning that filled maps doesn't work with cities, and switch the chart type to circles.  I'm done with "Regions" for the moment, so I'll remove it from the colors shelf and replace it with "Profit".  To avoid the Christmas theme (it's April, remember?) I'll click on the color legend and switch to red-black diverging (red is bad and black is good!).  Lastly, I'll bring "Sale" and drop it on the size shelf.  I now have a map showing a circle each of my cities, the size of which show total sales and colored by whether or not it's profitable.  It'll look something like this:

Two maps, both helpful.  Now that we know how to create each one let's bring them together.  Hop back over to your first map (filled by region) and duplicate it again.  We'll start with this one as we'll want the cities on top of the states/regions.

And here comes the hack. Hold down Ctrl and click and drag the Latitude pill on the rows shelf to create a duplicate one next to it.  You  should now have two of the exact same maps right next to each other.  

Right click that second pill you just created and select "Dual Axis" - now it goes back to one map.  But actually it's two identical maps stacked on top of each other.   Each of those stacked maps is independent of the other when it come to what you put on the shelf.  Each of the stacked items shows up where the marks are.  We'll click on the bottom one and change what's on the shelves to be the same setup as our profitability by city was:

If you've got it all right you should now have your dual axis map showing both region by state and profitability by city at the same time!

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Boom! Hope found that helpful!  If so, let me know.  Many thanks!

Nelson

Day 2: Hidden Reference Line Totals

It was Aristotle who famously said: “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”  When you look at your data, you better hope that's not true :).  But in Tableau sometimes that can be tricky to validate.  So for today we're going to see how to take a sliced up bar chart and show the total of each of the bars.  This one is probably filed under "There has to be a way to do this, but I just don't know what it is".  I have good news for you!  Here we go...

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Today (and for many of our days together) we'll be connection to everyone's favorite - the Superstore Excel dataset that comes prepackaged with Tableau.  We'll do this because it ensures that we're all starting from pretty much the same place.  So go ahead and connect to the data and we'll get started.

We're going to do a basic example that illustrates this trick.  Take "Region" and place it on the rows shelf, and "Sales" on the Columns shelf.  Next add "Department" on the Colors shelf, and finally add "Sales" again to the text shelf.  You're viz should look something like this:

Now here's the fun part.  Without adding the three Department sales together, what's the sum of sales for each region? Sure you could take Department off the color shelf and see the total again, but now you've lost the breakdown we're currently looking at.  That's a non-starter, as I want to present more information, not less.

So here's the trick.  Right click on the X-Axis and select "Add reference line, band or box".  You should now be looking at a popup box that looks like this:

Here's the goal.  Rather than creating an actual reference "line" we're going to make a hidden line with visible text, and the text will show the total sum of Sales for each of the regions.  Cool huh?

To do this enter the settings you see above.  
Click "Per Cell" 
Value: "Sum(Sales)"
Aggregation: "Sum"
Label: "Value" 
Line: "None" (this is done so that the line doesn't show, only the text showing the value of the total sum)

When you're done you'll now see the totals at the end of each bar.  It's likely that you'll need to do a bit more formating to get the text looking the way you want it.  So right click one of the reference line numbers, and select "Format".  My preference is to have right justification in the middle of the bar, but do as you see fit.  You could make the text larger, or change the units (maybe set it to $ Millions).  

And the final product looks something like this:

And there you have it!  Simple but helpful, just as any good hack should be.

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I hope you found this one helpful.  If so, I'd love to hear about it.  We're just getting started, so come back soon!  

Many thanks - 
Nelson 

Day 1: How to make a Calendar in Tableau

So this one seems logical.  If you started tracking with the #Tableau30for30 project you've likely already seen this this snazzy dashboard/interactive calendar:

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The first time I saw this was at Tableau Customer Conference 2013 in Washington DC.  It's simple yet really cool.  So how do you make something like this?

In it's most simple form, it's just bringing together dates in a number of different formats.  To start, you need data that has some dates.  For my purposes I simply went to Excel, entered 4/1/2014, and pulled down 30 rows to 4/30/2014.  Saved the file and popped open Tableau.

After connecting to my Excel file, I right click and drag the date field (mine is called "Date") to the columns shelf.

I'm given a number of options:

We're going to go through this a couple times, but be thoughtful as you do it.  We want to show the month at the top, so this time I'll select "MONTH(Date)".

We'll do the same right click and drag to columns, this time selecting "WEEKDAY(Date)".  This will give us the names of the days of the week.  To shorten these like I did, right click on one of them and hit format.  Under the Header tab, select "Dates" and choose your favorite (I went with "Abbreviation").

Next, right click and drag the Date field, this time to the rows shelf.  When the pop up comes, go with "WEEK(Date)".  This is going to give you a different row for each week of the month.  Since I don't care to see the labels, I'm going to right click the pill on the rows self and uncheck "show header" and hide them.

Lastly I'll right click and drag "Date" to the text shelf, and select "DAY(Date)" when it pops up.  

You should now have something that looks like this:

Right click one of the numbers in the pane and select "Format", and change as you see fit.  I've added borders to the cells and panes, hidden the word "date" at the top, centered text and changed fonts.  At this point it looks like this:

And wa-la.  A calendar.  You can use this as a filter (click a date and see what happened only on that date).  Or add data directly to the calendar (red-green color scale for bad/good days based on a metric).  The possibilities are endless.  

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Like this one?  Leave a comment below. 

Many thanks!

Nelson

Tableau 30 for 30

I have a big announcement today.  Really BIG.  

Come this April I'm doing something I've never done before.  Some would call it an achievement.  Some would give their left arm not to have to do it.  But for anyone who's made it there before, I think it's fair to say it's a moment to step back and evaluate the world, being thankful for the past that has shaped you, and looking forward to great things to come.  

This April I turn 30.

It's April 9th to be exact, and I know that build up was a little much, but 30 is a big one.  I have certainly had moments in the last few years that made me think my life would be over at 30.  That I'd be old, lame and irrelevant.  And while those first two words maybe scarily acurate, I have zero intention of riding off in to the sunset.

As such and to celebrate turning 30, here's a second big announcement:
Each day for the entire month of April, I'll be writing a blog post on the secret sauce of Tableau.  Jedi tricks and hacks - 30 of them.  30 days, 30 tricks.

• Out of the box visualizations
• Creating a look and feel 
• Advanced mapping techniques
• Connecting to data sources you didn't even know existed
  ...and much, much more.

Some of these tricks are my very own, but many of them are just simply things I've picked up in the 2 1/2 years of using Tableau and being part of the Tableau community.  

You're going to want to stick around for this and come back each day.  I'd also love to hear about some of your favorite tricks and hacks, so feel free to drop me a line as well.

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Many thanks!

Nelson

Who Really Won the "Big Game"?

Happy February Everybody!

I have three cool, quick things to share with y'all today and I hope you guys enjoy.

The first thing is this super awesome fun viz I did on the Super Bowl "Big Game" commercials.  It's an idea I got in my head about a month ago and I love the way it turned out.  Knowing that each year the amount being paid for a 30 second ad is some crazy number, but when the scoreboard clock hits 00:00 at the end of the game, what did that total up to - no one seems to talk about that.  And it's a lot of money, as I'm sure you can see below.  Of course the fun part of the whole thing are these awesome commercials that are supposed to be the best of the best from the world of marketing, so you can actually watch every single one of them right here in the viz (even make them full screen if you want).

Check out the viz below! 

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So here's the second fun thing - how do I make something like this?  This is all about how do I get an idea from my head to become a viz on the screen, and for me, I've learned a big important middle step - The Sketch.

It takes about 10 minutes, and I always do it in pencil, but it really allows you to quickly take an idea and see it.  And when you can see, you can improve it (which is something I know you believe because you do data visualization).

So here's the sketch I did for this viz.  It's cool to see the design work out this well in reality.  If you're not currently doing a little bit of pre-viz design, you should consider giving it a shot.  I've found that it actually makes the project take less total time on average, because you already have a vision of where you're heading.

The last thing (but first in my heart :) is a personal note that Baby Davis #2 was born a week and a half ago.  Mama and Baby are doing great and we are incredibly blessed with how smoothly everything went.

I want to thank the Tableau Community who sent lovely congratulatory tweets from all across the world.  It was really cool and I was very touched.  And don't be surprised if you see a Baby Davis viz coming soon.

If you have a comment, I'd love to hear it.  Thanks for checking it out!

Nelson