Tag Archives: Tableau

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Information to Graphics: Still an Arduous Task

  February 16, 2015

There remains a missing link between linking data to publish-ready graphics. Because many data visualization programs are designed for business use, they do not have the best customization and design options. A few updates could really boost productivity for us designers. Working on the Tobacco e-Book Projects we chose Tableau as our data visualization software. Tableau became most appropriate predominately for its ease of use and modern graphic style. Excel charts, even with customization, are easy to spot as Excel generated. Since we are anticipating this e-book to be published, we required a more custom format. Although Tableau provided a great start for our charts and graphs, we ran into several limitations regarding design. One such limitation was the lack of an ability to create templates. For this project, being an e-book, several graphs were needed, and a consistent style was needed. Unfortunately, each graph had to be manually adjusted. The font, font size, line spacing and a bunch of other variables were hand selected for each graph…very time consuming. To make matters worse, editing the spacing was never a precise move. I ended up placing a the previous graph onto whichever one I was editing and would “line up” the sides, and bottom of the graph. This was to have some approximation of consistency in line spacing throughout the e-book. It would have been a huge help to have been able to create a templates so that every font, every spacing attribute, color scheme and so-on, were already set.    The following parameters would need to be set … Continue reading

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The Tableau Experience

  November 20, 2014 , , ,

Today I attended “The Tableau Experience.” I’ve been struggling with what to call it: a conference, a convention… It had only one speaker, and a Q&A – and a wet-bar.  So… I’m settling with ‘experience’ as they do. What it really was though, was an advertisement. Don’t get me wrong – I like using Tableau to recreate charts for the Tobacco Ebook I’m working on, and this ‘experience’ was worth it for several reasons: 1. The speaker demoed several ways to share data that I haven’t seen in action since I’ve only been using it to create charts for data sets that are already created for me.   2. There were a lot of people there from many different kinds of institutions.  I met others from universities like me – Georgia Tech, Gwinnett College, and so on. But I spent most of the time schmoozing with a lady from Home Depot, and then talked briefly to a man from a company called Norfolk. Everyone was using Tableau for something different – I’m pretty sure I was the only one making an Ebook. 3. I was able to ask about that pesky issue Ryan Cagle and I have been having in trying to get the distance between pane tick marks and labels to be exactly the same in all our charts so they’re uniform within the Ebook. Sorry, Ryan – there is no way to do this. The guy I asked said your idea was the smartest. Overall, I’m glad I went to … Continue reading

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Tableau Training

  November 3, 2014 ,

Since the beginning of SIF, I’ve been on the Tobacco Ebook project. I have learned iBooks Author layout and design techniques, which has completely reoriented my thinking about how design works, and increased my attention to detail by… a lot. This week, I got moved from layout and table building within iBooks Author to recreating charts in a program called Tableau. Tableau can create really clean-looking, beautiful line graphs, bar graphs, and many other types of graphs and charts, like pie charts :). But it’s not easy. First, the data in the spreadsheets the book writers provided us with must be formatted in a way that Tableau ‘likes,’ which is a feat all on its own. If the data isn’t formatted properly, nothing works. Then, the chart has so many formatting options, its enough to make any beginner’s head spin. Here are two screen shots of graphs I’ve been working with that I can’t seem to get to combine – one line graph and one bar graph: The good news is that once I figure out how to make the graphs function the way I like, they are actually pretty easy to make and turn out well. Thankfully, Will knows how to do most of it and is helping me figure out the trickier aspects. Phew! Valerie

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Formatting Data for Tableau, data visualization software

  November 3, 2014

Tableau seems to be gaining traction as the go-to platform for data visualization. It’s common enough around CURVE and online to warrant learning or at least becoming familiar with. It’s an easy to use data visualization software with features far above the visualization tools Excel has to offer, and it’s free to students. Some of the more interesting aspects of Tableau are it’s geographic component, useful for mapping, and its ability to host online dashboards, effectively creating interactive data visualizations for your website or blog. In any case, at at some point your task will be taking existing data and formatting it into something pretty, or at least easy to understand. And if someone’s sending you data, it will most likely be from Excel; so it’s good to know how to Tableau reads Excel data. Believe me it’s not always cut and paste. Some general rules, to think about: Don’t summarize your data in Excel, e.g. grand totals, let Tableau do that. Take a redundant row-based approach to the data. Don’t let the whole picture be summarized across one row. Instead, use multiple rows each listing only one piece of data each (I’ll explain below) We were given a number of charts to recreate in Tableau and the essential problem was that the summarization needs to be left up to Tableau itself. Original Data Not Formatted for Tableau The problem with the above is Tableau does not understand it. Tableau doesn’t know 22 is linked to 12-17 years old, that … Continue reading