Category Archives: Tips and Techniques

Tips, tricks, and how-tos on working with Tableau

Selecting One to See One vs. All Other

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At the Boston Tableau User Group meeting this past month, Anthony Chamberas and I got to talking and he posed this brain teaser: he wanted a dashboard to show a bar chart showing volume for each region, and be able to pick a region and then on a separate line chart see the performance of that selected region over time compared to the remaining amounts. I kept on thinking about it on the ride back  to Maine, and between the Kennebunk exit on I-95 and home I put together this proof of concept while Catherine Rush drove and kindly listened to me think out loud.

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Lollipops for Healthcare Quality Improvement

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The Superstore Sales data that ships with Tableau makes life seem so easy: Numbers like Profit and Sales that go up, up, and up. But we don’t only measure things by how high they go, but also how low. Working with hospital quality data, we have small numbers like infection rates that we want to get even smaller. We have rates like the percentage of patients who receive aspirin on arrival that we want to get larger. And then there are measures like how many medication error events are reported that we of course want to get smaller, but we wouldn’t trust if that number got too small too soon because it might indicate under-reporting. Tack on situations like hospital units that may go for months or years without having any events (but are still mandated to report), data arriving at different times, and a variety of units with differing numbers of decimal places, and putting everything on one dashboard gets a wee bit complicated.

This is a process post about how I solved this problem for a hospital quality dashboard with some brilliant help, a dose of calculated fields, and a number of iterations. I presented this dashboard at the Tableau Customer Conference last month, and offer up this post as a a contribution to Tableau Design Month.

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User Defined Functions and Process Control Charts

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“Game over, man!”

That quote from Aliens was running through my head after our code control system had crashed without a backup. We were in the final days of testing a major release for one of the world’s largest telecom companies when a subtle defect in a hard drive controller had finally corrupted the disks enough that the contents could not be recovered, and our sysadmin hadn’t been doing regular backups because of competing priorities. I was way in over my head as a fill-in release manager while the usual guy was on vacation. I was convinced we were going to have to tell the customer that we would delay delivery by 2+ months, and along the way blow a big hole in our revenue and future deliverables.

Game over.

Then someone changed my life. One of the project leads, a rugby player and bartender from MIT, sat down with me and said, “There is a way. There’s always a way.” I can still remember two things clearly from that moment: the color of the walls (a beige made darker by the shadows cast by the fluorescent light fixtures) and his eyes. I wouldn’t call what was in them confidence, more a quiet certitude. I thought about that last week when hearing Walter Isaacson describing Steve Jobs saying “Don’t be afraid.” to the Corning CEO.

There’s always a way.

User defined functions have been a feature request for Tableau for a long time now. As much as we can share workbooks, and post function formulas, none of that has really worked as easily as we’d like. Read on to get access to over 50 calculations for computing run and XbarMR (individuals and moving range) charts, and learn how you can build your own shareable & re-usable sets of user defined functions. There’s also a preview of how the upcoming Tableau version 8.1 will enhance this process!

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Basic Monte Carlo Simulations in Tableau

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This came through my Twitter feed this morning:

And I looked at the article, and thought, “I can do that in Tableau.” About 20 minutes later, out came a pi estimator:

There’s a circle mark for every iteration, you can crank it up to 1,000,000 marks (on Tableau Desktop I can go to 2,500,000 marks, the Tableau Public Server is a little more limiting). However, the data source only uses two rows, it pads them out using the data scaffolding technique pioneered by Joe Mako where we use Tableau’s domain padding to generate the additional rows. To publish to Tableau Public I needed to use a data extract which does not currently support a random number function, so I used Joshua Milligan’s Random Number Generation post from the Tableau Calculation Reference Library.

A New Compact (Mostly) Filter Layout for Showing All the Options

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I’m preparing my Tableau Customer Conference 2013 session and there is way too much material to present in the time available, so I’m killing my darlings with a couple of posts in the next few weeks.

I had a situation where my users needed to select from a basket of hospital quality measures on a dashboard, and since some of the measures were new I wanted the filter to show all of the available options, and based on the dashboard layout there wasn’t really space on either side of the view for a vertically oriented filter.

What I really wanted was to show all the options at the top of the dashboard, I ended up getting a little creative and coming up with a new  filter layout. Read on to find out how!
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