Year-End Review: Best Blogs of 2022
Updated: Nov 7, 2022
Our staff loves all things data. From 9-5 they're developing dashboards, architecting cloud environments, transforming data, and doing all the things needed to modernize analytics for our clients. And then they sign off work and...keep thinking about these things.
I imagine our Tableau Power Couple - The Moore's - sitting around the dinner table. Chatting about their day, making sure their little guy eats his veggies. "THAT'S IT! I'M DRAWING A LOTUS FLOWER WITH TABLEAU!"
In all seriousness - the staff has provided some amazing content this year. If you're looking for Tableau tips and tricks, Python code to try out with dbt Labs, or a modern analytics roadmap, check out the links below.
Cleartelligence Data & Analytics Articles 2022
How To Draw Circles in Tableau
In recent years there have been multiple scientific studies designed to confirm what many of us in the Data Visualization Community have already suspected; when it comes to art, people are drawn to curves. Think about some of your favorite pieces of Data Art. I am willing to bet that the majority of them contain some type of curved element. Not only are curves more aesthetically pleasing than straight lines and sharp corners, but they have that ‘WOW’ factor, because as we all know, curved lines do not exist in Tableau. They take effort, and when it comes to drawing curves, most people don’t know where to start. But you don’t need to be an expert in Tableau to create beautiful radial charts, or to add some impressive curves to your dashboards. You just need to know the math, you need to know how to structure your data, and you need to know how to bring those elements together in Tableau. That’s the goal of this series. To hopefully demystify some of this work and make it more approachable, and to provide some examples. This series will focus on three types of curved elements; Circles, Bezier Curves, and Sigmoid Curves.
How to Create Bezier Curves in Tableau
There are many types of Bezier curves varying in complexity from very simple to ridiculously complicated. One commonality with these types of curves is that they rely on ‘control points’. This post is going to focus on quadratic Bezier curves, which have 3 control points. An easy way to think about these points is that there is a starting point, a mid point, and an end point, creating a triangle. The starting point and end point are simply the start and end of the line. The other point, the mid point, will determine the shape of the triangle, and in turn, what that curve is going to look like. Now let’s see how the position of that mid point (creating different types of triangles) will affect the curve.
How to Create Sigmoid Curves in Tableau
Whether you realize it or not, these curves are everywhere on Tableau Public. Sankeys? Sigmoid Curves. Curvy lines on a map? Sigmoid Curves. Curvy bump charts, or curvy slope charts, or curvy dendrograms, or curvy area charts? All Sigmoid Curves. The main difference between this type of curve and the Bezier curves we discussed in Part 2 of this series, is that only 2 points are needed to draw a Sigmoid Curve. If you have the start point, the end point, and the right formulas, the math will take over and create that nice symmetric s-shaped curve for you. So what formulas should you use? The answer is, as with most things in Tableau, it depends. We’re going to cover two different models for drawing Sigmoid curves, we’ll call them the ‘Standard’ model, and the ‘Dynamic’ model.
Think about most of the chart types that use sigmoid Curves. Sankeys, Curvy slope or bump charts, dendrograms…they all have something in common. The start of the lines and the end of the lines are uniform. If they are running from left to right, the start of all of the lines share an X value, and the end of all of the lines share an X value (columns). If they are running from top to bottom, the start of all of the lines share a Y value, and the end of all of the lines share a Y value (rows). When these conditions are true, which they will be in 99% of the applications in Tableau, you can use the ‘Standard’ model. If either of those conditions are not true, you can use the ‘Dynamic’ model.
Techniques for Disabling the Default Highlighting in Tableau
The thing that I love most about Tableau is the incredible flexibility. No matter what you are trying to do, there is a way to do it. And more often than not, there are actually several ways to do it. That’s where this series comes in. There are so many incredible hacks and techniques floating out there in the Tableau Universe, it can be difficult to figure out which ones to use and when. In each installment of this series we’ll be focusing on one specific ‘question’ and discuss the pros, cons, and use cases of various techniques. And our first question of the series is… “How do I turn off the default highlighting in Tableau when I click on a mark?”. And the answer is, of course, “It Depends”.
