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
Category: How to
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
Awesome Alteryx cache tool from the Alteryx community
Alteryx is a superb tool for data manipulation and it's generally very fast at what it does. However this only encourages us to put large volumes of data through its manipulation capabilities, which can cause annoying pauses during workflow development. Perhaps it's because your source database is non-too-fast or simply whatever function you're asking Alteryx to do over a billion … Continue reading Awesome Alteryx cache tool from the Alteryx community
How to map geographies in Tableau that are not built in to the product (e.g. UK postcodes, sales areas)
Tableau has a nice ability to create point ("symbol") or polygon ("filled") maps to visualise spatial data on. However, in order to do this, it of course needs to understand where each point you wish to plot is in the real world. Several of the most common geographic identifiers are built in, such as country, … Continue reading How to map geographies in Tableau that are not built in to the product (e.g. UK postcodes, sales areas)
Kruskal Wallis significance testing with Tableau and R
Whilst Tableau has an increasing number of advanced statistical functions - a case in point being the newish analytics pane from Tableau version 9 - it is not usually the easiest tool to use to calculate any semi-sophisticated function that hasn't yet been included. Various clever people have tried to work some magic aroud this, for instance by … Continue reading Kruskal Wallis significance testing with Tableau and R
A first look at Alteryx 10’s Network Analysis tool
Alteryx version 10 was recently released, with all sorts of juicy new features in realms such as usability, data manipulation and statistical modelling. Perhaps one of the most interesting ones for me though is the new Network Analysis tool. This provides an easy way to make network graph visualisations natively, something that many general purpose … Continue reading A first look at Alteryx 10’s Network Analysis tool
Dabbling with Data 