Author: Adam

The journey towards creating a Tableau Web Data Connector

I recently watched a video by Tableau/Alteryx/general guru Chris Love in which he emphasised the importance for people to not only retrospectively present their mindblowing successes at cajoling Tableau into running the universe - but also the journey leading up to that point, including any outright failures. After all, there is no shame in failing to do what one sets out … Continue reading The journey towards creating a Tableau Web Data Connector →

Beware! Killer robots swim among us

In a further sign of humanity's inevitable journey towards dystopia, live trials of an autonomous sea-based killer robot made the news recently. If all goes well, it could be released into the wild within a couple of months. Here's a picture. Notice it's cute little foldy-out arm at the bottom, which happens to contain the necessary ingredients to … Continue reading Beware! Killer robots swim among us →

Characteristics of England’s secondary school teachers

In exploring the data behind England's teacher supply model, it became apparent that the split of teachers by gender and age shows certain patterns by subject. Click through and use the below viz interactively to answer questions such as: How many secondary school teachers are there in the UK? What percentage of all teachers are female? Are there certain … Continue reading Characteristics of England’s secondary school teachers →

Quick tip: find location of column in a SQL database

Now we all have nice access to large sprawling relational databases, the next problem is locating in which table you need to look to find the data you're after. For instance, which of the 100 tables available contain my sales? Of course the proper way would to consult the comprehensive, accurate, well-governed and accessible data dictionary to … Continue reading Quick tip: find location of column in a SQL database →

Comparing partial week-so-far data with prior year values in Tableau

Happy new year to all! And now that's over, back to work. The first drama of 2016 was opening up some spiffy new Tableau dashboards someone made to see how business is at in the first week of the year, only to find apparently catastrophic results. Sales this week were way below sales of the … Continue reading Comparing partial week-so-far data with prior year values in Tableau →

How many teachers do we need? The official Governmental model

How do we know how many teachers are required to keep the UK's schools in good working order? It's an interesting question, with obvious implications for Governmental education policy with regards to teacher compensation, incentives, training places and so on. The "official" requirements are calculated via the Government's "Teacher Supply Model", which, happily, in the … Continue reading How many teachers do we need? The official Governmental model →

Showing the formula behind a Tableau quick table calculation

Tableau gives super-fast access to many common analytical operations via its "quick table calculation" feature: running total, percent difference, moving average and so on. Just rightclick the measure pill, select "Quick Table Calculation", make your choice and often that's all that's needed. But what if you want to customise them in ways beyond what a simple "edit table calculation" … Continue reading Showing the formula behind a Tableau quick table calculation →

Setting up the automatic “upload to Tableau Online / Server” feature in Alteryx 10.1

Alteryx released their new version 10.1 this week - license holders/demo seekers can pop along to the download page to install it. Amongst the new features it promised was: Automatically update Tableau Server and Tableau Online with a new Tableau macro The concept is simple: process/model/advanced-analyse your data in Alteryx and then it will push up the … Continue reading Setting up the automatic “upload to Tableau Online / Server” feature in Alteryx 10.1 →

The Sun and its dangerous misuse of statistics

Here's the (pretty abhorrent) front cover of yesterday's Sun newspaper. Bearing in mind that several recent terrorist atrocities are top of everyone's mind at the moment, it's clear what the Sun is implying here. The text on the front page is even more overt: Nearly one in five British Muslims have some sympathy with those who have fled … Continue reading The Sun and its dangerous misuse of statistics →