Applied Zen in Tableau

This waydoesn’t really do what I want

No wayno other option

This way

No way

Another wayWhack your

brain, your data, and/or your viz

with a stick

Excel starts with presentation“Paint” formatting onto the screen

Excel starts with presentation“Paint” formatting onto the screen

Tableau starts with dataVisual elements (and their meaning)

derived from attributes of data

Thinking Orthogonally

• Going beyond the “usual” ways of displaying your data–Mark labels to show numbers and text– Dual axes to show calculated trend lines

and reference lines– Custom SQL to pad and reshape on the

fly– Table calculations for fun and

amazement

• There’s always Excel / OpenOffice

Southern Maine Medical Center

150 bed hospital and 18 medical offices located south of Portland

Big bang implementation of new medical record, patient care and HR systems in 2013

Quality Management - tracking >1500 metrics

Using legacy systems, paper, SaaS, Excel, Access, and Tableau

Provider Rankings (sample data)

Infection Prevention (sample data)

Readmissions Analysis (sample data)

Conditional Formatting via the Multiple Axis Crosstab

See the viz at http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/conditionalformattingv4/

Introduction

Multiple Axis Crosstab• Instead of using the Text mark with no axes on the Columns shelf

and Measure Names as the way to get multiple columns, we have a “fake” axis for each column and use Text, Shape/Circle/Square and/or Gantt Bar/Bar marks and mark labels to show the values.

• Advantages over Measure Names/Measure Values:– Can mix text and numbers, left and right alignment– Each column/row can be formatted differently using Text, Shape, or Bar

marks– Can even use Bold, Italics, and Underline for calling out text

• Disadvantages– Extra work to set up– Extra white space in the view– Harder to see what's going on in the view, since Measures are on the

Label shelves and not on Rows/Columns or visible on the Measure Values Card

– Sensitive to display size (particularly for Shape/Circle/Square marks)– Slower performance due to making Tableau do more work to display

data

Mastering Tableau

• Pick an area– formatting, mapping, table calculations,

survey analysis, data reshaping, dashboards, Tableau Server, big data, etc.

• Use Tableau training resources– Training videos, do the online training, read

the knowledge base articles– RTM, Rapid Graphs in Tableau book

• Practice, practice, practice– Tableau forums are a great place

Links• Online Training - http://www.tableausoftware.com/learn/training• Tableau Forums -

http://community.tableausoftware.com/community/forums• Rapid Graphs in Tableau - http://freakalytics.com/• Tableau Blogs

– http://freakalytics.com/– http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/– http://vizwiz.blogspot.com/– http://vizcandy.blogspot.com/– http://jeromecukier.net/– http://tableaulove.tumblr.com/– http://eagereyes.org/– http://voyrapido.tumblr.com/– http://vizualoutcomes.com/– http://www.thedatastudio.uk/– http://www.datarevelations.com/– http://www.interworks.com/blog/– http://theinformationlab.co.uk/blog/

• Data visualization: Edward Tufte, Stephen Few, Naomi Robbins, Nathan Yau, etc.

The Other Kind of Visualization

Comments, Questions?

Jonathan Drummeyqm.jtd@smmc.org

@jonathandrummey