Somewhere in my outrageously long list of data-related links to check out I found "data.world". Not only is that a nice URL, it also contains a worthy service that I can imagine being genuinely useful in future, if it takes off like it should. At first glance, it's a platform for hosting data - seemingly biased towards the … Continue reading data.world: the place to go for your open data needs?
Author: Adam
Lessons from what happened before Snow’s famous cholera map changed the world
Anyone who studies any amount of the history of, or the best practice for, data visualisation will almost certainly come across a handful of "classic" vizzes. These specific transformations of data-into-diagram have stuck with us through the mists of time in order to become examples that teachers, authors, conference speakers and the like repeatedly pick … Continue reading Lessons from what happened before Snow’s famous cholera map changed the world
Books I read in 2016
Reading is one of the favoured hobbies in the DabblingWithData household. In 2016 my beloved fiance invited me to participate in the Goodreads Reading Challenge. It's simple enough - you set a target and then see if you can read that many books. The challenge does have its detractors; you can see that an obsession with it will perversely incentivise reading … Continue reading Books I read in 2016
5 Power BI features that might make Tableau users a little jealous
New year, new blog post, new tool version to play with! It's clear that the field of data-related stuff progresses extremely rapidly at present, and hence it behoves those of us of an analyst bent to, now and then, go explore tools that we don't use day-to-day. We may already have our favourites in each … Continue reading 5 Power BI features that might make Tableau users a little jealous
Retrieving Adobe SiteCatalyst data with R
Adobe SiteCatalyst (part of Adobe Analytics) is a nicely comprehensive tool for tracking user interactions upon one's website, app and more. However, in the past I've had a fair amount of trouble de-siloing its potentially immensely useful data into external tools, such that I could connect, link and process it for insights over and above those you can get … Continue reading Retrieving Adobe SiteCatalyst data with R
Actually you can use variables, CTEs and other fancy SQL with Tableau after all
A few months ago, I blogged about how you can use Tableau parameters when connecting to many database datasources in order to exert the same sort of flexibility that SQL coders can build into their queries using SQL variables. This was necessary because Tableau does not let you use SQL variables, common table expressions, temp table creation … Continue reading Actually you can use variables, CTEs and other fancy SQL with Tableau after all
Future features coming to Tableau 10.2 and beyond – that they didn’t blog about
Having slowly de-jetlagged from this year's (fantastic and huge) Tableau conference, I'd settled down to write up my notes regarding the always-thrilling "what new features are on the cards?" sessions, only to note that Tableau have already done a pretty good job of summarising it on their own blog here, here and here. There's little point … Continue reading Future features coming to Tableau 10.2 and beyond – that they didn’t blog about
What people claim to believe: Hillary Clinton edition
Back to political opinion polls today I'm afraid. Yep, the UK's Brexit is all done and dusted (haha) but now our overseas friends seem to be facing what might be an even more unlikely choice in the grand US presidential election 2016. Luckily, the pollsters are on hand to guide us through the inner minds and … Continue reading What people claim to believe: Hillary Clinton edition
Do good and bad viz choices exist?
Browsing the wonderful timeline of Twitter one evening, I noted an interesting discussion on subjects including Tableau Public, best practice, chart choices and dataviz critique. It's perhaps too long to go into here, but this tweet from Chris Love caught my eye. https://twitter.com/ChrisLuv/status/788541483355873281 Not being particularly auspicious with regards to summarising my thoughts into 140 characters, I wanted to explore some thoughts around … Continue reading Do good and bad viz choices exist?
Remember the exciting new features Tableau demoed at #data15 – have we got them yet?
As we get closer towards the thrills of this year's Tableau Conference (#data16), I wanted to look back at one of the most fun parts of the last year's conference - the "devs on stage" section. That's the part where Tableau employees announce and demonstrate some of the new features that they're working on. No guarantees are made as to whether they'll … Continue reading Remember the exciting new features Tableau demoed at #data15 – have we got them yet?