Reduce, Reuse, Recycle...

"Reduce, reuse, recycle"... As I work on developing a new set of dashboards for my current client, I'm coming to realize it's a great motto for coding challenges in general. Too much code makes every little change a headache, and introduces yet another chance to make a mistake.

With Tableau specifically, creating dynamic worksheets allows us to develop fewer dashboards, provide our users with a more consistent experience, and cut down on maintenance time to boot. Anyone who's created a dozen identical dashboards and then had clients change their minds about some small layout detail knows what a pain it can be to fix. With dynamic dashboards, you fix it once and you're done!

Today, though, I'll be looking at the phrase a little more literally. I came across some recycling data on the EPA's website the other day and decided to see what I could put together using the Tableau 8 beta. Treemaps are one of the many new features coming out in version 8, and seemed a natural fit for the problem at hand.  I wanted to the end user to walk away with two pieces of information: The biggest types of packaging waste in the US, and what percentage of each type of material gets recycled. Take a look at this static image and let me know what you think:

Paper is by far the biggest source of packaging material waste, but at 71% has a pretty solid recycling rate. On the other end of the spectrum, a mere 1.9 million tons of plastic are recycled, despite plastic making up over 14 million tons of waste overall.

While putting this view together, I noticed that Tableau 8 now allows you to put multiple items on the color, label, and size shelves! It doesn't seem to do much more than concatenate the values of those fields together, but it's still a nice touch. It never made much sense to me why rows and columns could each accept an unlimited number of fields, but the other shelves could not. So kudos to the Tableau team!

Where's the Money Go?

Topics covered: Calendar controls, Calendar visualizations


I've always been disappointed in Tableau for not having a built-in calendar view. Fortunately it's remarkably easy to construct one yourself using Tableau's wide array of date functions. All you need to get started is a data source with at least one date field.

As it turns out, this knowledge came in handy for a personal project I've been working on.  I recently moved into the city from the far-flung suburbs of Virginia, and have been noticing my wallet feels a little lighter than usual. Even taking into consideration the usual suspects (higher rents & grocery costs) it didn't seem like I should be seeing quite this much damage to my bottom line.

I decided what I really needed was two things:  A quick visual to let me identify days of above-average spending, and a breakdown of category spending by year and quarter.  Below is what I came up with using data from one of my credit cards (lowered by a random factor for privacy reasons).  If you want to learn how to set up your very own calendar control, read on after the jump.

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Find Your Next Vacation Spot

As a resident of the DC area, I often find myself seeking cooler climes in order to escape the oppressive summer heat. The problem I always run into is that, while there are thousands of websites that'll tell you what the weather is today, very few give you a picture of a city's overall climate.  When they do, they tend to present this information in such a way that makes comparisons across cities very difficult (weather.com, I'm looking at you). What if there were a way to summarize the climate for every major US city within a single view?

I took a stab at the question using free data from NOAA. Here's what I came up with.  Click on a city to see the average temperature for each month.

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Basic Flowcharts in Tableau

Topics Covered: Creating a flowchart, Custom shapes, Formatting numbers within string labels

A colleague recently challenged me to create an interactive, automatically-updated version of his user acquisition flowchart in Tableau. The chart in question was a simple diagram of a website's user registration funnel, and he had been updating it manually for weeks at a considerable cost to his sanity. The product team laid out the following requirements:

• The funnel needed to represent four basic steps. Without going into detail, we'll call them "landing", "sign-in page 1", "sign-in page 2", and "complete."
• Three absolute metrics needed to be displayed for each of these stages: Users, estimated user value in dollars, and visits. Conversion rates also needed to be calculated for each (so we could say 25% of users went from "landing" to "sign-in page 1", 10% from "sign-in page 1" to "sign-in page 2", etc).
• The graphic should allow for at-a-glance diagnosis of under-performing pages.
• All metrics, both absolutes and conversion rates, should be able to be trended over time.

While I can't share the actual dashboard I designed for this project, below is one I put together from scratch based on a traditional eCommerce checkout funnel. Try out the filters and click on the icons to see trended views of each metric. More details on construction behind the jump.

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