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!
