3 Ways to Make Lovely Line Graphs in Tableau

Tableau Lovely Line Graphs FeatureDue to the popularity of 3 Ways to Make Beautiful Bar Charts in Tableau, I’ve decided to follow it up with some ideas for making your line graphs more engaging in Tableau. Line graphs are a close second to bar charts as my favorite fundamental visualization type and are the obvious choice for evaluating trends over time.

Like bar charts, the invention of line graphs is generally credited to William Playfair at the end of the 18th century. Also like bar charts, I blame their age and people’s familiarity with line graphs as the reason some data visualization enthusiasts look for “more engaging” choices. Line graphs have stood the test of time and their effectiveness cannot be denied. I’m hoping that these three approaches help cement line graphs as a top choice for your Tableau data visualizations.

Announcing Playfair Data TV: An Online Tableau Learning Platform

Announcing Playfair Data TV Ryan SleeperI’m excited to share the launch of my latest project: Playfair Data TV. Playfair Data TV is an online learning platform that includes Tableau video tutorials across eight tracks. At launch, there are 26 videos – totaling over 3 hours of training – spanning fundamentals, chart types, dashboards, technical features, advanced topics, and tips. New videos will be added every month following the beta period (ending 9/30/2018).

We’ve invested a lot into making this the best resource it can be. Members receive exclusive access to every full-length, high-quality video tutorial as well as their own dashboard to keep track of their bookmarked lessons. Playfair Data TV offers monthly subscriptions that can be cancelled any time or lifetime memberships that will provide the member access to anything added to the platform in the future. Note that if you plan to attend one of my live training events, a lifetime membership is included with your ticket.

Year in Review / Top 10 Tableau Tutorials of 2018

Ryan Sleeper Top 10 2018 Year in Review FeatureThank you for your support in 2018. This time of year is always a time of reflection for me, and one consistent theme I’m grateful for – and which I’ve come to realize is the single biggest-driving force behind my career – is you: the community. Your support has not only inspired me, it has made it possible for me to grow personally. You have forced me to sharpen my skills by teaching and challenged me to provide better solutions. So Thank You.

Each year, I ask how could the next possibly be better, but 2018 included more huge updates: (1) I rebranded my analytics consulting agency, Ryan Sleeper LLC, to Playfair Data, (2) we launched Playfair Data TV, a premium online Tableau video training resource, (3) my book Practical Tableau was published, and (4) I had the opportunity to speak at 8 Tableau user groups across the US, Canada, and England. And, of course, I released more content! 41 blog posts and 50 videos to be exact.

As a small token of my appreciation, I’m sharing my top ten posts and some statistics from my blog. My hope is that this content helps you in your Tableau journey, and that my observations provide some insight into the current state of the Tableau / analytics community. I’ll close the post by previewing even more announcements coming in 2019.

3 Ways to Create Charming Crosstabs in Tableau

3 Ways to Make Charming Crosstabs in Tableau FeatureThis is the third in a five-part series on getting the most out of text in Tableau. For future updates, subscribe to my mailing list.

I’ve explained before that a spreadsheet is not a data visualization because it does not take advantage of any pre-attentive attributes that will help you make sense of the data. Alas, many stakeholders continue to ask for crosstabs (text tables), either so they can do their own manipulation to the data or just because they feel more comfortable seeing the raw numbers. Well, if I have to make crosstabs, I intend to make the best damn crosstabs the world has ever seen!

That’s why for the first time, I’m letting the genie out of the bottle and sharing 3 tips for making your text tables more effective and engaging in Tableau. In this post, we’ll cover how to increase the number of columns in a Tableau crosstab, how to make your text tables as flexible as possible, thoughts on maximizing the data-ink ratio, and how to make custom table headers.

3 Ways to Make Handsome Highlight Tables in Tableau

3 Ways to Make Handsome Highlight Tables in Tableau FeatureTo draw a highlight table in Tableau, you need one or more dimensions and exactly one measure. This is the same criteria to draw a raw text table in Tableau, except with highlight tables, you’re limited to one measure instead of one or more measures. This one measure is what encodes the cells in the table by the preattentive attribute of color. It’s essentially a spreadsheet with colored cells.

As I shared in my post, Why do you visualize data?, the highlight table is my favorite chart type for introducing the value of data visualization. I think it works well because most companies are still using spreadsheets for most of their reporting, and by converting a text table to a highlight table, the audience is forced to take advantage of the preattentive attribute of color. This kind of becomes a gateway to more complex visualizations.

Highlight tables are already more engaging and effective than a text table / crosstab view, but this post aims to provide three more ways to make your highlight tables even better in Tableau.