The Data Studio

Underemployment in the UK

2012-11-29T14:55:29Z

There is a lot of information buzzing about in the news at the moment about the growing levels of underemployment. It was a concept which was new to me but the more I read about it the more I realised that it is an extremely relevant topic in today’s economical climate. It is all very [...]

Facebook Data in Tableau

2012-11-28T13:00:30Z

Social Media data is one of the fastest growth areas in the BI world. The dashboard below shows one of the possible ways you could use facebook data. This dashboard focuses on the demographic, who, where, how many and what they think. The data for this visual was collected using The Data Studio’s connector plus: [...]

Google Analytics in Tableau V8

2012-11-19T16:42:52Z

I’ve used several tools for extracting data from Google Analytics (GA) in the past so I was particularly excited to find out about the new connector in Tableau V8 straight in to GA. Once you click Google Analytics from the list of data sources, you have to enter your Google authorisation credentials. Then you get [...]

Tableau 8 Beta – The Kraken

2012-11-19T12:26:31Z

The Tableau 8 Beta was released to conference attendees last week, the beta program gets the software out to real world content producers and gives Tableau feedback on any bugs or last minute feature requests. Tableau do a great job with their releases, as each year they jump the competition in features and usability. Just [...]

Menu Navigation within a Tableau Workbook

2012-10-24T09:34:09Z

There has been a conversation floating around on how to successfully navigate around different sheets of a workbook. On the face of it there doesn’t appear to be an obvious way of doing this in Tableau (perhaps Tableau 8.0 will address this!!). However it is possible and below is an example of a menu system [...]

Select A Chart

2012-10-23T10:07:27Z

One of the requests we get quite often is can you set Tableau to have interchangeable charts on a dashboard so that when the user can select which chart to show in a particular place on a dashboard. Whilst not out of the box this is something that is very much possible using parameters and [...]

Art in Tableau 2

2012-07-30T09:23:46Z

This is our second belated post on producing art in Tableau. Well strictly speaking the visuals are more mathematically generated patterns with parameterised variables… Powered by Tableau

Tableau Customer Conference 2012 – Barcelona!!!

2012-03-30T10:10:42Z

A Tableau Customer Conference is always fantastic. We always tell our customers that if they can spare the time and budget then they’ve got to go. How good are they? They’re so good this will be my fifth Tableau conference in a row! This year promises to be as great as ever with customer stories [...]

On Her Majesty’s Secret Server

2012-02-15T12:27:22Z

Tableau’s second European conference is fast approaching (for full details click here). I cannot recommend these conferences highly enough. Tableau’s organisation at these events is faultless and the speakers are inspirational. The conference is also a great opportunity to meet other fellow Tableau evangelists and see how they are putting Tableau to use within their organisations. [...]

Art in Tableau 1

2012-07-25T14:52:57Z

We love playing with Tableau and seeing what new things we can do with it. These visuals all look better on a full screen so please feel free to download the workbook. Powered by Tableau

Data Connections – Making life easy for your fellow colleagues

2012-01-24T10:11:31Z

In my experience most technical IT types love to name databases and data fields in weird and wonderful ways. A good example is this gem I encountered recently “ATV”, take a guess at what that means. If you create a data field called “ATV” and then expect your user base to understand what it means [...]

Three Little Phrases

2012-01-02T19:55:18Z

There are a few phrases I find cropping up regularly in the office that I think are useful and I’d like to share with you: “Great answers breed even better questions” This is the power of iterative analytics; the results of the analytical process provokes more refined, more targeted questions from the users. I *love* this [...]

Dashboard Failure

2011-12-08T21:14:11Z

Nobody blogs about failure, right? In meetings and during training sessions I often talk about both failure and success. Specifically, I often mention my definition of dashboard failure which is if the user asks: “Can I download this data into Excel?” This will, of course, happen but your role as a designer is to identify what [...]

Groundwork for Custom Table Calculations

2011-11-22T10:33:06Z

Custom Table Calculations is one of the most advanced concepts in Tableau. The main resources Tableau provides can be found at On-Demand Advanced Training – Table Calculations and Top 10 Tableau Table Calculations where you can find a variety of examples and a white paper with additional details. The capability of custom table calculations goes beyond the information provided in those [...]

City of London Spending – Jan 2011 to September 2011

2011-11-01T16:39:09Z

It’s always interesting to see where government is spending so here’s some data on a platter… Powered by Tableau

Nato Operations in Libya – The Guardian

2011-11-01T11:05:14Z

Revisiting the Guardian Data Blog's infographic on Nato operations in Libya.

To the point

2011-10-26T14:55:17Z

At the recent Tableau Customer Conference (more on this later) one of the many excellent sessions I sat in on was Tips and Tricks From The Wild. Last up was the Tableau jedi, Joe Mako (@joemako or on Google+). Within the Tableau community Joe is famed and respected for his ability to see straight to [...]

The King is dead. Long live The King.

2011-09-20T08:54:55Z

We’ve been incredibly lucky to have had Andy Cotgreave blogging on our site for the last year and so it was bittersweet news when Andy told us that he was moving to Tableau. We were all, of course, delighted for both Andy and Tableau but it did mean that Andy would not be able to [...]

Tableau T-Shirt Designs – Our least productive hours at the Data Studio…..

2011-09-19T10:57:06Z

Tableau are running a competition to design a t-shirt for their 2011 conference (do try and go if you can – they are amazing). So we had a little fun this afternoon making some suggestions for a t-shirt and here’s one that we came up with. If you’d like to enter, tweet your suggestion with [...]

Goodbye!

2011-09-14T12:55:30Z

It’s my last week at Oxford University and as a Data Studio blogger. From next week, I cross the divide and become a Tableau employee. So far, my Tableau journey has been a blast, and I wanted to look back at my life as a Tableau customer. I’ve been at Oxford 4 years, and looking [...]