Nashville Tableau User Group - September 29, 2021

great thanks again we're here with our nashville tug virtual number 17. we've been doing this quite a while thanks to the pandemic glad to see everyone recognize some some names and faces just a bit to point out this session is recorded and will be out available on youtube publicly so bear that in mind if you speak up or turn on your camera you're not anonymous you would remain on mute unless you are speaking and if you have questions during a presentation feel free to put those in the chat we'll review those as time allows after each session additionally if you prefer to remain anonymous just send me a private chat in zoom and i will review that and ask the question on your behalf see i think that's it i'm really excited for what we're going over today let's skim over the agenda so we know what's up and what's next you are now experiencing the welcome once again welcome we'll have sportsviz sunday in our community spotlight by spencer balke then we'll have trivia hosted by eric howard our trivia master will learn to love layout containers katie wagner can do the job you will see we'll then go over sankey diagrams i find that people either love or hate these they've either heard of these and are very interested or haven't heard of them and are very interested whichever camp you fall into sarah brewington will show you effective ways to produce those in tableau then we'll have some announcements and call it a day any questions before we roll right into spencer's session and the community spotlight scene in a chat oh okay all right spencer it is yours thank you for being here today thank you so much for having me uh can you hear me sorry i was muted okay awesome well hey uh my name is spencer bauke and i am here to talk to you a little bit today about a tableau community initiative called sportsviz sunday i am a principal consultant at tessellation and co-founder of sportsviz sunday i've been involved in the tableau community for a few years now i think i published my first tablet public vis in 2016 so i kind of marked that as my uh starting off date but it's really helped me get to where i am so i'm really honored to be included in this lineup today my other sportsviz sunday mates are kate brown and simon beaumont kate was recently named the tablet ambassador and simon beaumont is a tableau zen master ambassador and i think everything else under the planet under the sun so quick little icebreaker what is your favorite sports memory that you've either witnessed on tv or firsthand and i asked this question because i know a lot of people have memories connected to sports including myself and one of my favorite sporting events that i saw on tv i was not in person was the university of cincinnati really highly ranked in the country beating pitt on a last second play on a snowy day at heinz field and i can just remember the game-winning touchdown as time ran out and me jumping up and down um being like yeah we finally did it well that is the kind of energy and passion that we try and take from your life and experience and turn that into the same excitement around data visualization and getting your practice in at tableau or whatever visualization software you use so what is is sunday sportsman sunday is an initiative to encourage the creation and sharing of sports themed viz so it's really a it's a community more than anything that relates to each other via sports and data and our passion for it and in addition just as a as a fun side you get to practice and and improve your skills at tableau and data vis in general so just a brief history of how it started in 2018 i got together with simon and james smith and we decided hey we all love sports we love being involved in the tableau community and so we started this initiative and this was our first attempt at a logo and as you can tell none of us were really graphic design majors right this thing is terrible but we have vastly improved since then for some reason they let us present at capital conference 2018 we all joked and thought hey if we can get 10 people to show up to this thing like this is a success well luckily we didn't have a problem getting 10 people in we actually had a problem with enough space in the room that we were presenting in so that was pretty sweet that turned into another invite to berlin where we all got to present um at tableau conference europe in 2019 and after that a few months later in las vegas and it was a big hit filled a conference room it was really really fun so after vegas we uh we had been in you know working on this initiative for a couple years now and we decided hey we want to really take this in a in another direction and so what we settled on is we wanted to get more guesthouse from the community involve more community members we wanted to get more advanced data and then collaborate more with people in the community so that's exactly what we did over the past couple years we've had some really awesome guest hosts and if you look on the left hand side you'll notice some names that i guarantee you recognize if you're involved in the tablet community zach geiss and jacob osufka ryan soares these are some really really active people in the community and they've uh guest hosted several months and given us some really awesome data sets um that ties into the more advanced data sets we want we were trying to go for more technical more granular uh more all-encompassing data sets uh that really challenged people and not only their growth in tableau but also the analyses that were presented so for example zac guys provided us the shot locations of every single shot taken in the nba since 1997 over 5 million rows of data the things that people built with this data set and contributed to the community were just amazing to see there were so many different takes and stories um that that people found it was just really cool to see so we've done similar things like that with champions league if you're familiar with the soccer tournament player locations and tracking and then major league pitch locations we also partnered with pro football focus to get play-by-play rushing statistics for the nfl as well so these are just a few examples of the data visualizations that were created just specifically with that mba shot location data again some really cool stuff if you go out there on tableau public chances are a lot of the shot uh plots and stuff like that are going to be made with some of the sports with sunday data sets and then finally that brings us to the more collaboration speech which was part of our goal uh a couple years ago we partnered with iron quest when it was first starting out and actually that brings us to today at our current month's challenge is an another iron quest collaboration to visualize your sporting heroes and that's what we're wanting people to do is go uh whoever your hero is uh right in whatever sport you like uh visualize it contribute it to the iron quest challenge uh and tag sports fits sunday in there as well and that leaves us with well okay you've told us what sports this sunday is and it's conceptually you know what it's about well how do i get involved so every single month we post a monthly data challenge to data.world and i'll show you the link here in a second to data.world and to sportsmansunday.com we put it out there for people to go take it and visualize now when people uh visualize it we ask that you share it on either twitter or linkedin and use the sportsviz sunday hashtag because what we do at the end of every week is we go through twitter and we go through linkedin and we search the sportsviz sunday hashtag and we take all of the things that were contributed to the community using that hashtag or other if we find other stuff and we put them in a weekly roundup blog so that on sundays you can follow me kate or simon and find the sportsviz sunday weekly roundup with a it's a blog with all of the content from that week you can also volunteer to be a guest host you can reach out to us either on twitter or via the website and you can volunteer to be a guest host and provide your own data set that you're passionate about and that allows you to get involved put your name out there and also help promote sports this sunday and then we have a large repository that includes all the data that we've ever used at sportsfit sunday.com so you can go and you can connect to the data there and play around even if you submit or you don't so again this is our data.world site it's data.world sportsbiz sunday you can go and connect to our data using the tableau connector or you can go to sportsviz sunday.com where you can see our blog data and uh see more about the people there we've had a lot of awesome people and so we just want to say thank you to all the people who have participated and helped make this community what it is these are just some names a lot of these people are also zen masters for tableau multi-time tableau ambassadors just a lot of great creative and super awesome people that have helped make this community what it is so we encourage you to check out our website uh follow us on twitter and get involved that is sportsman sunday nice thanks spencer i don't see any questions in the chat so by that respect you nailed the presentation would that be a three-point shot for swish swish there you go three point nothing but net here we go awesome thank you you have the kahoot queued up because i think we're ready for that all right i just posted the link into the uh chat if you want to click on that or go to kahoot.it or could hoot it let me share my screen great and it's a really good idea for everyone to participate there's a gift certificate to the winner it's double digits 50 gift certificate this time spoiled it yeah fifty dollars sweet with the table store right it's better to say i think i know who's going to win if there's only one participant pretty easy all right so our nashville tableau quiz for september ready set go first one is a poll you can pick any answer which tug breakout room topic would you join we're going to do this in a couple months my favorite tableau feature how do you use tableau new user q a or how often do you tab low so zoom breakout rooms let you just go out and talk about a specific topic so we're curious what topics you would be interested in participating in click the answers and uh we'll make it happen probably do this again next month get with a different set of topics so all right my favorite tableau feature sounds like a winner so another poll are you interested in presenting at a tag tug meeting okay maybe yes i would love to no and yet never or yes with some help so um we'd love to have each each tug have a local presenter if that's you we would love to hear from you and there are a couple of us that would be willing to help if you'd like to do it you're not sure how so let's get together and make it happen [Music] all right some on the fence but that's good and two that's our definites thank you all right here comes the quiz which came first in products tableau prep tableau desktop tableau server or tableau public one answer one answer only the more points you get yeah [Music] tableau desktop was the first all right next up oh we get the scores is that al or ai we have somebody who's using ai to win this which came first features spatial joins buffers map layers or data quality warnings uh if you haven't noticed there's there's a pattern to this quiz so facial joins buffers map layers or data quality warnings which came first correct angel spatial joins all right we're getting some separation with this one hey i dropped down and lindsey took the lead all right which came first these are server items explain data collections personal space or tableau prep conductor [Music] so if you're getting to notice the pattern every question is which came first just different topics of which came first all right nobody got that one that was tough i have to admit that was tough tableau prep beat out uh the other by about a month or two or a version or two all right which came first in features set controls in operators quick lods or vis animations all right pretty evenly spread there but three got it correct way to go lindsay takes the lead not a commanding lead but definitely a lead all right which came first this is a mixed bag tableau public tableau reader tableau online or tableau mobile which came first i made this earlier this morning i still don't remember the answer so there you go tableau reader came first all right sarah jumps to the lead way to go sarah okay which came first in connectors we have tableau extensions gallery tableau notifications in slack secure our connections and oauth and open id connections if you'd like to learn more about connectors join the tableau dev users group and you'll get knee deep hip deep into all of that with uh python and r and everything all right sarah's still in the lead which came first in the tableau conference virtually anywhere new orleans las vegas or seattle tell from the picture i'm kind of hopeful that maybe someday they want to come to nash vegas and have it but five correct answers it was seattle they had it at home at first all right way to go people sarah won a.i came in second and lindsay came in third congratulations and i will stop sharing um lindsay no uh sarah if you would post your email in the chat to um jim dinner you will make sure you get your gift certificate all right sir if you just if you just send it to me private that way i'll i'll have it and get your gift certificate tomorrow thank you congratulations well done everyone that was fun i think the uh that last one was a gimme i was like grabbing for it yeah i made something easy some hard right okay are you ready to learn to love layout containers we have katie wagner with us to show us how it's done uh this can be a pretty tricky topic but i bet she can make it intuitive for us all we're gonna try to love them i still have my off days i'll admit that it's hard to live in an abusive relationship it really is but show us you got it all right y'all give me one second to get stuff set up here we go fantastic and i'll keep an eye on the chat if anyone has any questions feel free to send those over so thank you all so much for having me here at the nashville tableau user group i believe that there were lots of new names of folks that i haven't met before on the attendee list so i'm glad to see all of you um i am a data fan member for the past lots and lots of years let's say around 2014 is when i really started to get into tableau and that conversation came out of i really want to be in this realm but i really don't want to do any coding or programming that was what i would tell everyone that i spoke to um joke's on me because i still do write calculations in tableau but it is definitely much more intuitive so i've been a loving member of the data fan for a while now was extremely fortunate to be a social ambassador for a few years and loving everything that the community has been able to bring together as we're all living in this pandemic world if we haven't spoken yet if you haven't uh met me yet one of the big things that everyone knows about katie wagner is that she's from louisiana so i am currently in baton rouge louisiana and i am vying for another new orleans conference when we get back to in-person conferences so that's always going to be my vote but i think one of the things that i may have assumed incorrectly about members of the data fam community or just people who used tableau in general was where folks background came from in tableau and i say this because i have a business degree i've never taken a graphic design course i don't have any formal academic training in anything that has to do with design and so i see these people especially spencer was showing us some of the examples from sportsviz sunday creating these beautiful unbelievable visualizations and it can start to give you a little bit of imposter syndrome a bit so what i'm here to tell you all my secret i'm not a designer i think of the word designer with some extra emphasis and i like to compare it to the same way that you would think about a home cook versus a chef i think that there's some training and some formality that comes behind that title of chef or in my mind that title of designer now because i'm not a designer i'm going to use every opportunity that i have to try to level up to try to increase my skills and make things that i'm proud of and along my tableau journey one of the ways that i was able to do this was by finding the structure finding the organization finding the patterns just like you can see one of my pastimes is cross stitching i love it because there is a pattern and if you follow those guidelines you end up with a beautiful finished product so that's how i stumbled upon layout containers but there were a couple of tricky things so i'm hoping that i can open up some new ideas for you in using tableau's layout containers the first thing that we want to focus on is the fact that we are in the dashboard space in tableau so that's the only place that you will see these layout containers because their primary purpose is to help us organize the information that's on our page so think about things being aligned think about things being the same size those are the kinds of benefits that we might get from using these layout containers you're going to be able to find them just to give you a bit of focus in the bottom left corner of your dashboard screen underneath your dashboard objects you've got these horizontal and vertical layout containers but hold on why do i even need a layout container tableau is supposed to be easy right why can't i just drag the things to the page well let's take a look at what we stumble across on this visualization i have a couple of charts already here and when i pick up the sheet for age what i'd like to do is have it share this center space here one vis two vis three biz that's what i'm hoping for but when i pick up my age worksheet and i drag it onto the dashboard i can put it to the left or to the right of division i can put it to the left or to the right of account but they don't really share that space very well and so we want to think about well what is it that we're missing tableau's trying to make some assumptions for us whenever we drag these sheets in and it does a pretty good job but we need to tell it hey this space here i want them to be equally shared and so that's where something like a layout container can be really helpful for us we've got two main types of layout containers i'll be 100 transparent with y'all they didn't make a whole bunch of sense when i first looked at them so hopefully by going through them and seeing some examples it'll help to click a little bit better but the big thing that i want you to take away from these containers is that a horizontal layout container is going to allow you to control the width of the items that are within that container and we'll see some examples later but think about if you need really specific pixel perfect imagery or alignment in your dashboard you might want to control how wide that object is and then as you may have expected our vertical layout containers are going to help us control how tall an object is we're going to be looking at the height of the object within the dashboard seeing some chats come up there we go okay yeah jim says we get that backwards i do too for some reason my brain just couldn't compute the difference in horizontal and vertical and i don't know why that seems strange to me all right so let's take a look at what adding in these different containers might help us to do remember we're trying to stack division account and age all across that same center portion of the dashboard the first thing that we know is because we're stacking them left to right because we're aligning them left to right we're using a horizontal container and so you can pick up these containers in the bottom left hand corner of your dashboard and drag them onto the screen looks pretty harmless right just a big empty box remember these containers are placeholders for objects to go inside of one of the things that i do want to point out about this container is the color of the border that you're seeing around it so this differentiates a container from other objects containers are going to have a blue border around them whereas if i click on something like a worksheet or an image or a text box those are going to have a gray border around them instead so rule of thumb gray objects go inside of blue containers and that helps me to keep that alignment in mind now one of the things that you might run into because it wasn't all sunshine and roses when i was trying to learn layout containers i try to bring objects into that container in this case i'll try out a text box and i know i put it in there but like i can't figure out how to get it into the container right i'm not seeing anything that would indicate the container so tip number one make sure that the container is big enough you can always resize it later but if you're adjusting in this case we want our container to stretch across the page i want to adjust the height so i'm going to drag up the top of this container i'm going to make it taller even just temporarily and what that's gonna do is it's gonna open up more space for me to drag an item into the container the second tip that i'm gonna give you is man we can get sort of lost with some of these pieces right lots of containers lots of layout eric pointed out in the chat the drag and drop item hierarchy in 21.3 i have not tried that out later but i'm sorry i haven't tried that out yet we'll talk about it a little bit later i'm really excited for it but i'm ready for it to be in desktop so we'll get we'll get to that in a minute on how we can use that item hierarchy because i love that thing so we've got our container but before we start dragging items into it the second tip that i was given was put in some sort of placeholder i like to add in a blank just because typically it's easy to get rid of i don't have to remember why did i put it in there was it waiting for some text or an image etc so i'm going to pick up a blank object and i'm going to drag it into this container and again i know it's in the container because of that blue border that pops up all right perfect so we've got our blue item i'm sorry we've got our blank object inside of our container now we can start stacking things side by side you might be familiar with this already but the way that you move objects around in tableau is by picking up the tab at the top of the object so i'm going to pick up division and notice that when i bring division up to the container i can place it to the left of the blank object i can place it to the right of the blank object so i'm just going to start by putting it on the left and then when i pick up a count one of the key things that shows me i'm actually inside of the container is this blue dashed line that appears and what that's saying is you're going to put this worksheet that you're moving in between the bar chart and the blank that you've set up so i'm going to pick up account and i'm going to place it come here let me get rid of this other container i'm going to pick up a count and i'm going to place it to the right of division and then finally we have our age sheet that isn't on the dashboard yet i can pick up age and i can drag it over to the right hand side seeing that dashed line again between account and the blank placeholder that we put into the container now you're looking at this and you're saying wait hold on i thought it was supposed to make them more evenly spaced this still looks kind of funky and that's because the blank is just a placeholder it isn't meant to be there permanently once i've put everything that i need into the container and that does take a little bit of preparation and planning then i can choose to just get rid of that blank object and again it was just making it easier for us to add objects to the container so i'm going to remove my blank and they look pretty good they look pretty spaced out so steven's asking why do we have to put the blank item in the container we're going to take a look in the next example of what happens if you don't do that it's not a requirement just a helpful tip that was shared with me along the way and we'll take a look at why so i've got my container and i'm looking at these objects they look pretty good they look pretty spaced out but we can be even more specific so think about this if the width of the dashboard is around 1100 doing some quick math divide that by three each of them would be about 366 pixels wide yeah i'm not doing that for each one of my dashboards that's a lot of work so i want to tell y'all i do remember vividly being in the audience for what seemed like just a little tiny feature release that was fantastic and that's this idea of distribute evenly i don't want to do the math and so if tableau does it for me if tableau can evenly distribute these objects that's a plus one in my book so keep in mind remember blue layout container that's the border i'm looking for i can right click on that container or in the upper right corner i can choose the drop down arrow and i can select this second option which is distribute contents evenly and just to check my notes here it looks like that came out in 10.3 so it's been around for a bit you probably have all upgraded um to that version or a future version by this point so distribute content evenly is extremely helpful i don't have to do the math now the other instance that i first thought about or was taught to use layout containers was to create sort of a title bar up at the top of my dashboard think logo think dashboard title sort of have everything in one space so i'm going to move a couple of pieces around here move these sheets down and what i want to do is up at the top of this dashboard i'm going to add in a horizontal layout container that contains my logo and my dashboard title so a little bit of movie magic gonna go a little bit quicker here i pick up my horizontal container i drag it to the top of the page i'm going to put my blank object in that's just our placeholder for now i'm going to pick up an image for my logo so i'm going to left click on this image drag it into the container place it to the left of the blank i'm going to choose to fit this image and center this image because i know kind of the size that i want it to be so we can see that by default it just fills up half of the container it says hey you probably want to share the space with the blank at this point i could pick up a text box and i could drag that into my title container in my specific case i have a worksheet that has a dynamic date on it that i want to use for the dashboard title so i'm going to pick up that sheet i'm going to drag it into my horizontal layout container but it looks kind of funky the first thing is that this sheet has a built-in title that comes along with it so i'm just going to right click on that worksheet and go ahead and hide that title i just need the content not the name of the sheet and then i want to be very specific so if i'm following some sort of template or guideline from my organization they may have some rules around how large the logo can be how much padding it needs around it what it can be placed next to and so i know that i want this logo to take up only about 80 pixels of width in this container and this to me is where we start to get really specific with containers this is the joy of pixel perfection because i can click on that object i can choose to edit the width and i can tell tableau that it needs to be exactly 80 pixels wide and that's going to be consistent no matter what dashboard i build if i have the same dashboard with i know that this icon will be exactly the same size now i don't need this blank anymore and i would prefer that the title fills in the rest of the space but i want to show you something that happens this little push pin icon that you have on an object what that's saying is hey the setup that i have for this object right now keep it there don't let it move around so we're going to click on that push pin and then when i get rid of the blank object my expectation is that tableau would expand my title sheet for the rest of the container to fill it out but when i choose to close that blank remember it's like we put a piece of tape on it and we said nope it's stuck here it can't move so one of the things that you might notice people will say oh you know editing the whiff of these containers can be confusing in this case my icon is fixed my icon has a standard width my title can be flexible so i want to un-pin i want to remove the width constraint from my dashboard title and that's going to fill in the remainder of the container and this might happen sometimes you might see little sideways lines or cross-hatched area in your container some extra space that tableau is not using and that's because your objects are pinned in place and they don't think that they have any room to expand so i'm going to unpin my title and we can see that it nicely fills out the rest of our horizontal container here so nick's asking if we know why the software lets us accidentally convert the horizontal container into a vertical i do know that the placement of the objects will give you a tiled container depending on how you put them in together but i'm not sure nick off hand why it would um why it would convert it automatically so a good thing for us to look into afterwards definitely all right so we've got the main setup of our dashboard but again back to that question why do we need that blank object in the first place i also want to think about some formatting components that we might have so i like just a personal design choice of mine to put a separator line in between our title and the remainder of the dashboard information and there's a few different ways to do this but one of the ways is by adding a blank object in between our title container and the remainder of the dashboard to do that though i have to be able to stack these items from top to bottom i need to make sure that i can align them vertically so here's what i'm going to start off by doing i'm going to pick up a vertical layout container i'm going to drag it to the very edge of my dashboard you can see that it's going all the way along the left-hand side of the entire height of my dashboard and if we think about what that means i'm going to hop over into the layout pane associated with dashboards because we want to spend a second in what's called that item hierarchy that eric brought up earlier we've got this by default tiled container so again when you have vertical and horizontal objects together tableau says well this container is tiled it's got both types my gripe with a tiled container is now i can't control the width or the height so it doesn't necessarily help me out that much what i need is a container that stretches across the entire dashboard that lets me control the height of all of my stacked objects i've even been given the advice by curtis harris in his famous video that i'll send a link to afterwards that container can go when you start building your dashboard if you go to the item hierarchy first and you want to get rid of what it creates for you bye bye we don't necessarily need it because we can create our own layout with our own containers so let's take a look at what happens i did not put a blank in this vertical container but i'm going to start moving objects into it i want to pick up my horizontal title but remember we don't just want the objects in it we want the entire container and a quick way to get to the entire container rather than having to click on the drop down arrow and choose select container just double click if you double click on the tab at the top of an object it'll choose the container around it and then if you double click on the container it'll choose the parent container around it so it's sort of this hierarchical building nice sorry becky i was just seeing your note about inheriting a tiled layout dashboard it's creating that item hierarchy so i'm going to double click on my horizontal container you can see the blue border around it i'm going to pick up that container and drag it into the vertical i'm sort of starting over and i'm saying nope this vertical is going to be my main dashboard component i'm going to pick up my under construction sign i'm going to pick up the container that has the vision account and age and then i'm going to pick up the container that has team lead job title and years of service and stephen this is the point where i think the blank is pretty handy because i want to place these three charts underneath division account and age but when i try to do that it looks a little weird so first thing i see is that tableau is trying to put a horizontal container inside of my other horizontal container that's not what i want if i try to pick it up and drag it to the very bottom of my vertical container it fills up what looks like half of the page but i'm also not seeing that dark blue border so what this tells me is i'm not actually putting this into the vertical container at all if i had a blank there it would have some space it would have a gap and so i could arrange all of the objects in the way that i wanted to now like i said this is not a requirement to add the blank because here's how i would approach this issue i'm just gonna put my bottom three charts in the wrong spot i'm gonna put them above division account and h and then i can rearrange those objects i can pick up the container for division account and age and i can drag it on top of team lead job title and years of service so like i said just a little added benefit of having some kind of temporary placeholder in there so that you can align them correctly but if you forget to put it which i do most of the time not a big deal you can work around that factor so finally let's think about that formatting that we were trying to do right having that line across the dashboard now that we have our vertical container i get to choose how tall that separator line can be so one of the ways to do this and like i mentioned there's multiple but one of the ways to do this is to pick up a blank object drag it into your vertical layout container make sure that it stretches all the way across the vertical layout container and by default tableau is giving me a height of 32 pixels and i can see this from the layout tab on my dashboard screen that's a bit tall that would be a very thick very big border to separate both of them i personally like to keep those separator lines somewhere between three and five pixels but if i try to type that in if i try to edit the height again we're doing that from the drop down arrow on the blank object if i try to edit the height of this object and make it three pixels tableau says nope your height must be greater than the total top and bottom margins what you talking about what it top total top and bottom okay let's let's look at this so in addition to containers adding a little bit of extra in here you may have noticed that at the bottom of the layout pane you have padding and this is really just tableau saying let's give some breathing room let's give some space around these components that you're putting on the dashboard by default when i drag a blank in it's going to have four pixels of padding all the way around the object and what that means is the very minimum height that i could put in would be nine because it has to have at least eight for the spacing around it now containers are unique in the fact that tableau does not add any padding to them if you look at a container's outer and inner padding it's all set to zero so no big deal here's how i'm going to choose to fix this in my layout pane underneath outer padding i choose the drop down arrow and i set the padding for this blank object to zero all the way around because i don't want that space i want it to take up the entire width of that vertical container so i'm going to choose zero because the padding numbers are equal because they're locked when i hit zero everything zeros out and now i have the opportunity to click on my object because it's in a vertical layout container i get to choose how tall it is so i'm gonna edit its height i'm going to make it 3 pixels tall and then to get that separation i want to color in the background of this blank object so on my background i'm going to pick our color let's do a let's do a quick piece here just because i don't have this custom color saved i'm going to go into more colors so again i'm on my background drop i'm going to choose more colors i have the opportunity to pick a screen color and i want it to match my logo so i'm hovering my cursor just like in paint if any of you have used microsoft paint hovering my cursor over that logo to pick the correct blue and when i press ok you can see that everything is now in the correct scene it's on brand so again just a little recap there our horizontal layout containers let us control the width or in these containers we can ask tableau to distribute the items evenly so we don't have to do the math and then our vertical containers are going to let us open up the height of the object in addition to being able to control the height and the width and exactly how much space something takes up i also like containers because they give you this sort of separation factor if you want to think about taking your dashboard and breaking it out into zones or areas one of the options that's available is to put a border around the container so this is an let me back up here this is a dashboard container that has both the division and the team lead horizontal views in it and if i choose to put a border around it you can see that that sort of groups together those six charts as a zone so visually my eyes are focused on those six collectively and i think that's a nice enhancement that we can add if you want to put some of that visual focus there you also have the opportunity because you could control the height and the width to put in customized borders so this rather than being a container border it's actually an image that i created in powerpoint i chose dotted or dashed lines but imagine that you have some sort of iconography that you want to use and maybe you've been able to create a separator line with maybe little tiny hearts or little tiny stars if that's the brand that you're going for because i can control exactly how wide they are i get to say the sheets are going to be x number of pixels wide the separators are going to be a much smaller width than our actual worksheets so just a couple of formatting options that we have here i do want to spend just a minute or two on our item hierarchy because this helps us to sort of organize and look out how those objects are placed in their containers what you can see here is we have a horizontal container that has the division worksheet my line separator the account worksheet and so on so i can see inside of that horizontal container exactly what items are within it and eric mentioned earlier that one of the new features and unfortunately i haven't had the opportunity to upgrade yet to the new version of tableau but one of the new features in tableau if you're on tableau online or tableau server you can actually drag and reorder these objects outside of the container that they live in inside of the item hierarchy so instead of having to find the tab on a really small sheet and move it around on the dashboard canvas i can just come directly into the item hierarchy and i can for example pick up this navigation button and move it into horizontal container one so this is a new feature that i'm excited to check out once we're able to upgrade our tableau server hopefully we can do some editing give me a little less of a headache whenever i'm looking at tableau server last but not least one of the really exciting features of these containers that tableau came out with a few launches ago was the fact that we could make these objects collapsible real estate is super super important on our dashboards because our devices are so small that we need to fit a bunch of information in so being able to collapse that information and expand it on demand is really helpful now we have had some upgrades since then it's not just containers anymore that can be collapsible but i'm going to show you how that might be beneficial for the work that you're doing so on this worksheet i have a filter associated with this voluntary termination rate where i can choose the termination type so if i come into my filters sorry folks let me take a look let me go ahead and add that as a filter okay there we go so i've come into my voluntary termination rate sheet i want to show this termination reason filter on the dashboard and when i do so tableau is going to put it where it thinks it should be so in this case you can see we've got two of them here in the view it's added in this object but it's sort of placed it on top of everything else so just be aware this started out with containers but now in newer versions of tableau you have the opportunity to add a show hide button to your containers so again i haven't upgraded yet if you wanted to you could go directly to the filter and you could say add show hide button or if you're using an older version of tableau you can bring in a floating container so that's the kicker for previous versions of tableau it does have to be a floating so think a sticker that can be placed anywhere rather than a tiled container but if i drag a vertical floating container into my dashboard if i pick up my filter and i place it inside of my floating container now i'll see our option when i select that container to add a show hide button so again this is going to save you some real estate and for those of you that work in an organization like mine that's a bit delayed in upgrading tableau this is the way that we're going to go about it you create that floating container you add the objects inside of it and then you can choose to show or hide that button would look a little bit like this move this over would look a little bit like this with the um x and the little hamburger menu by default so hopefully you've picked up a couple of tips here this is my experience with layout containers and how they've helped me to be a bit more organized and they've settled some of the anxiety that i get from this pixel perfection but there's lots of different ways to organize your dashboard and hopefully this makes it easier for you to share with others um as we had earlier so as becky had mentioned earlier if somebody's inheriting your dashboard now you can come in and you can have sort of a structure to it that might be a bit more helpful for them to understand so question in the chat can we show how we created the title the vertical bar the second line yes um let me go back to our container here so i'm and i may be pronouncing it incorrectly i apologize stephen or stefan is the is this title container what you're looking for up at the top with the logo uh no not the logo where it says people overview april 2020 the only time i've ever been able to create a title i can just put text in it without that formatting without the second line of text with the smaller font yeah that right there i got you okay yeah no problem so this is a worksheet um and i chose to do this because the april 2020 can be an updating date rather than just a static component inside of a text box in tableau and so what i've got here is the [Music] dynamic date if you will this is a static data set but let's ignore that we've got this dynamic date and i've placed it onto the text button of my marks card and i want to make sure that the mark type of this sheet is a text mark so instead of a line or a bar i want to make sure that it shows as text and then at this point what i can do is click on the text button click on the little ellipsis so that i open up the actual text box of what's going to be displayed on the page so i'm choosing text choosing the little three dots and now i have the opportunity to insert that dynamic field but also format different lines separately and sort of make it look exactly like i want it to all in the space of a single dynamically changing worksheet that makes sense thank thank you yeah no problem any other questions that i can answer thanks kayla alrighty well again thank you all so much for having me i hope you picked up some helpful tips and be sure to reach out online linkedin or twitter if anybody has any questions in the future great well done katie thank you so much uh thank you super informative thorough um no lots of us learned lots with that are you all ready we're 66 through the meeting i've got one more presentation for you sarah brewington is a colleague of mine at nava health she's going to walk us through sankey diagrams just to show you where we're at in our agenda at the 4 30 mark central time sarah are you ready deal welcome thank you um so this is my uh tableau user group debut so bear with me nerves and all of that all right so i am going to go through how to build a sankey diagram this is something i usually recommend for um more intermediate to advanced users i have walked a few beginners through this and it's a little bit overwhelming but i won't say it's out of reach if you're a beginner there are a lot of different ways to do this there is a built-in feature that you can use with tableau extensions but i i know at least in my personal experience with privacy concerns we're not able to use extensions that we haven't built internally so i've had to find kind of creative hacking ways to build sankis internally for work so i'm going to go over a couple of things that i've done in the past to do that so just a quick intro a stinky diagram is just a diagram that visualizes proportional flow rate um they date way back all the way to the first use of note in the 1800s during napoleon's invasion of russia and that is this visualization you see here on my screen this is kind of a really powerful example of how to use a sankey because it kind of gives you a gut punch reaction to what you're seeing here um so this sankey is overlaid on a map and it shows flow of troops into russia during the campaign and then back out so you can see right away a lot of people went in not that many came out so this did not go well at all um so i really like using this this diagram as an example of when to use a sinky because it's a really quick high level to get a complicated high-level view that you can get across really quickly with one glance without having you know your user go into too much analytical detail so once you use a sankey pretty much any time you want to show kind of that many to many mapping between categorical dimensions showing a flow it's by no means a best practice uh for any time you want to show this kind of analysis but um it's definitely a good quick high level easy to easy to eyeball thing when when you do use it um i will also preface this by saying i'm by no means a sankey expert um i i won't pretend to understand all the complicated calculations that go into you know sigmoid curves and keys and all of that stuff um so anyone really can do this if you're able to kind of follow instructions and understand how tableau works um i mentioned the extension way to build it i'm not gonna i'm not gonna go through that right now um but i will highlight two other options for how to build one yourself without using extensions um the first one is an option that uses no data model which is great especially if you have like a really big data set and you don't want to be you know causing any duplication in a really big data set this one is a good one to use it's a little bit harder to do because you have to go in and create calculations yourself and deal with some nesting table calculation it's just really really easy to get wrong especially if you're not super familiar with table calculations so in this method you have to come in and update orderings and specific dimensions for each of these nested calculations for it to work so it's definitely a more advanced route for a less advanced visualization i feel like it takes some of the creative control away from you and keeps it really simple like this so i'm not going to go step by step through this particular demo but i i will include this in my materials at the end so if you do want to to go through the calculations yourself um the workbook has links for a demo on how to do that um the one that i'm gonna do a step-by-step demo on is this monstrosity um it's it's a lot to look at but um there there's a reason for that i i wanted to show you all a way to do a multi-tier sankey so you can see like a full flow without having just you know two steps um but the good thing about this method is it's highly customizable um you can choose however many levels you want to show within your stinky you can make the levels dynamic you can make the flow sizes dynamics so right now we're looking at sales you could change this to see flow of discounts from each of your dimensions um and there's also this handy white space parameter that lets you control how much of the view the sankey is taking up i think that really helps highlight you know which flows are much bigger than other ones and uh helps it a little bit helps helps it be a little bit easier to digest for end users um so i'm going to walk you through step by step exactly how i did this the source of this template is one of the large twins i don't know if you guys are familiar with them they're kind of rock stars in the tableau public world their blog is a really great resource especially for beginners or people who are just looking for more creative ways to to visualize their data these guys are awesome and what i really like about them is they don't just show what they can do they make all of their tableau public visualizations downloadable so you can download it and dig in and see exactly what they did to get to this point um and this article which is linked in the workbook that i'll make sure everybody gets has templates for every kind of sneaky visualization you could ever want to build i picked kind of a middle of the road difficulty one just to walk you through some of the more difficult steps without going too deep into detail but you can get really down into the weeds with these showing traceable detail level safety flows but i digress there you're gonna need a couple of things from this website to use this template method um and it's down here at the bottom all the files is the name of the link i can't access it on my work computer because of security issues but um if you are able to access this you can download all of the templates that they have available here along with um some excel sheets um data models and that is one of the things that we're going to be using today as well i'll give you a quick little peek at this so this is the data that they were using in their their sankey just kind of dummy data doesn't really mean anything and then the model is what we really need from this file so they've set it up to join their data model to their data just with this dummy link column there are a couple of different ways you can do that but i i will get into that so it does all of the mapping for the complex i don't know if it's trigonometry calculus all of the complex calculations that are needed for this type of visualization for you so really all you have to know is how to replace field values in coupling so i am going to actually downloaded these earlier this is one of the templates that you will find in the all the files link on their blog and then i also did a quick export of tableau superstore data to use for this demo and then the model template is that last five position referrals would be an excellent use for this we've got a similar one at navajo that kind of monitors progress of patient flow through one of our uh one of our patient support programs so we can see you know what kind of help have we given to these patients and are they ultimately coming back into a hospital setting or are they you know staying home and having healthy like we want them to do so yeah that's a great response [Music] there's a kickstarter when people are watching me sorry okay this is their template as it comes you can see kind of that dummy data in the labels here um so the first step you're going to want to do when you're you're taking this template and trying to put your data into it instead of the dummy data is go down to the data source tab click into that since i downloaded this package workbook it's asking me where the data is so i'm just going to select that template excel file that we got from the same location as well like that you're showing this this from a fresh download because there can be a lot of little gotchas like that yeah i i practiced this two or three times and it worked much faster before so i apologize okay so i'm gonna click into the migrated data here and then you can see we're using that sinky template file the model joined to the data tabs with that fake link link field that they created in both of these um you don't have to create a link column in your data when you do this you can easily join it on one equals one which is what i'm going to do but that's also an option if you'd rather do it exactly as they do so to bring in my data and replace theirs with mine i'm just going to come over here and add a connection mine's an excel file but you can do this with sql data with anything you want to do just join it to the same to the model the same way um my superstar here this is a step you really would have a hard time with you have a gigantic data set that isn't filtered much um that that's one of the use cases you would need for one of the more complicated methods of building a sinky because this kind of duplicates some of your data and that can take a very long time this is not a big problem it takes a second anyways all right so now i've got my superstore file here i am just going to drag in my superstore data and replace their data with mine it's going to break that connection because i didn't have that link field but i'm just going to go down here and join one [Music] and now we can come back to the dashboard [Music] join on one i forget the official name of is that a cartesian drawing nick yeah or cross join so you're matching every possible record on one side with every possible record on the other side you you could use the link that the keyword link if you have a link on the other or like you did the one and one that's why it's a nightmare with really large data sets as well because you're carrying every row with everywhere so this is usually much better performing when i'm not sharing my screen and using video i think my wi-fi network is to plan for this don't let that scary i think lindsay asked a question about doing a cartesian join here lindsay the reason you're doing this is you're exploding the data set so that each one of these little points and you can't see me pointing at the screen but each one of these lines is a series of very short lines and it's creating all those points that need to be joined together so that that's what's happening during this process and the one equals one just says match every record in one data set with every record in the other set so if you have 10 records in one set and a thousand in the other set you end up with 10 000 records did i did i use up enough time sarah yeah thank you you can see here that everything is broken don't let that scary it's supposed to be broken we just took their data out and put ours in so it doesn't know what it's supposed to be looking at yet so i'm going to go in and i'm actually just going to go ahead and unhide all of these sheets so in this template they've got four different flows within the sinking i'm just going to stick on this one while we do do the workplace work so you can see how they have it laid out they've already got all the fields exactly where they need to be they've got all the calculations set up exactly the way you need it to what you really have to do with this step is go in and replace their missing fields with your fields so they had it simply named set one through five in their original data set which you can see those are all missing now since we replaced their data with ours and then the the measure that controlled the size of the flows is just named size so we're going to replace all of that with what we want to do and this is a spot where you can really get creative you can create a parameter that lets you dynamically choose which each step is representing um that takes a little bit more time i don't know if i can actually do that but i will go ahead and just do a general basically um so first i'm going to come in and replace their step one with what i want my step one to be which is the field segment so you can see now segment is replacing what was step one on there step two i want this to be this reference want this to be region size let's make size let's actually make size i'm lining i'm going to create a parameter [Music] so i've now created this parameter and now i'm going to create a new field to use for size so basically what this is doing is saying when when the user has sales selected i want this flow to be based on sales when they have this consulate i want it to be based on business and then i'm going to replace their size field with our new there we go ours is starting to look more like it should and the other flows to get them working same steps that we did before just go and replace their steps with the ones that you want so let's go from region to let's go from category and you can go you know as far as you want i have done sinkies that have more levels than this and i had to go and create all of these different calculations by myself don't recommend it's doable but it's a bit much but you can do you know as many or as few of these as you like just you know remove what you don't want and it's very customizable i really like the white space option again it helps you kind of isolate those bigger flows a little bit easier um and then a step i always do after this is i get the colors on brand with company company colors but yeah it's very customizable up to this point and another good thing about using this template method is that you have tool tips and everything already formatted so you don't have you know sigmoid and t and path bins all laid out within the tooltips that you have to go and edit for each individual sheet because that's that can be a lot of work and that's something that you have to do in some of the other methods um that's that's pretty much it i mean you can go in and update the dashboard actions as well you can see here that um these aren't highlighting when i hover which a lot of people have a problem with so you can easily fix that by going to actions and just unselecting what you want that cover to to affect so a lot of different options here for customizable uh stinky charts um i hope that made sense uh happy to answer questions i know stinkies are a lot and i found personally that it's sometimes hard to find an appropriate use case for them um but uh the few times i've been able to use them they've been they've been big hits with users so hope that was helpful so anyone have any questions i put one in the chat sarah okay also want to open the floor for others um the number of possible dimensions be too big you mean the number of levels within well i'm thinking like almost like a pie chart right so like looking at that far right one uh the orange boxes yeah with this particular template do you recommend like trying to pick dimensions that only have like five options or less or ten options or less or yeah it's kind of dependent on what exactly you're trying to do as a best practice i try not to do anything that's gonna you know look like a giant bowl of spaghetti um like here's what you really shouldn't do yeah that was a bad idea what are you doing to us and then again people will come in and add color to each individual you know dimension and it can get really messy you want to be careful with these it's easy to build something that you think is really cool but it ends up you know being rainbows and unicorn spaghetti for the end users so i i urge caution um one of the templates that the thrillage twins does i think is really good when you have big data sets um this traceable one so you can have a ton of records in here but you can highlight exactly where one record went through the entire flow that's one i haven't actually tried to create yet but i think that would be a really useful one if you've got a data set where you really want to try a snakey but you've got see you don't even want to do it at all because it just takes too long yeah caution is is a good it's a good thing to have in mind and buildings awesome this is cool it made me feel like i could do this [Music] you certainly made it look easy that's after many many frustrating sessions of trying to build one organically all credit to to the amazing for watching i don't know if i'm saying that right i'm i'm laughing with the the amazing in front it makes them sound like a trapeze act yeah they they are amazing and uh we've had the pleasure of having one of them on uh that's cool once or twice before any any other questions before you go on to community well done sarah um really excited and encouraged for what you showed us today [Music] right we are now ready for the community spotlight this is where we'll go over uh announcements for the larger community this is largely led by jim daynor jim you know i downloaded the powerpoint but i've been juggling i did no i just didn't open it yet it's it's in my inbox um do you have it handy or do you want to scramble i'll go find it in the meantime sarah that was outstanding i don't i want to i want to tell you that is not easy to do and you made it understandable thank you so great job agreed i can send a link in chat i actually i uploaded my workbook to uh tableau public if anyone wants to download it and dig in i think i've got it in my clipboard pop that in there i've got it there you go yeah i got it i'm gonna i'm gonna start sharing right uh right about now okay can can you all see that now yes okay very very good i want to go over several announcements that center around the next month and a half and that's a and that all leads up to the conference the 9th for the 11th in the u.s and it's a little bit longer on the tail end of that outside the u.s so if you if you see people talking about the 9th through 12th the 12th is outside the u.s but if you haven't signed up already here's here's the link that's where you go to sign up please sign up uh rumor has it that one of our very own is going to be speaking at the conference eric is going to speak at the conference eric do you want to just kind of tell them what you're going to speak about oh it's a conversations about data governance so um we had technical glitches during the recording so i'm going to be reserved about until seeing my name on the uh list before i publish it on linkedin or anything but yeah we'll let us know i think it'll be good okay well once again the conference is free okay usually if you do these things in person it's like a thousand dollar fee to go to the go to the conference conference is free you're gonna get to see great speakers by all means sign up for it for those of you who are familiar with brain dates there's going to be two sessions of brain dates there's going to be a session before the conference october 12th through october 14th there are going to be brain dates and we just had a meeting on this the other day i'm going to be doing some brain dates if you want to come out and sign up with me uh i'm doing brain dates on any type of calculation but go out to this link you can sign up to do a brain date or you can sign up with somebody else to attend a brain date and it's either a one-on-one session or there are group brain dates so take advantage of that because you get to you get to meet some you know pretty impressive people i think ken and kevin uh ken and kevin fleurlidge are going to be doing them i know i will be doing them there will also be brain dates inside the conference now uh starting in january there's going to be a brand new users group and it's for newbies and uh uh klaus uh somebody's got a mic open that's all right you can you can go to the conference too no you can uh klaus uh klaus filthy's in germany and i uh we are co-leaders for a new users group it's dedicated to newbies and when we talk about newbies if you're past that getting started point and you want to expand your uh your skills or you just want to meet with other people who are at the same level it's a group for you you can sign up and enroll in that group right now and here's the link where you can go out and you can sign up for that group we'll make sure that you're all included on all the communication and also if you have an idea of topics that you want us to cover if you you know something's important to you or you want to hear certain certain speakers let us know and we'll see what we can do about making that happen but the first meeting is going to be in january there's going to be more about this in the coming months and you're going to see it at uh see that conference also now this one's kind of a personal thing if there's any k-12 teachers out there who are using tableau or would like to use tableau either in the classroom or with an analytics club or maybe a competition uh please contact me uh i've got something going on that and i'd like to i'd like to find uh one or more uh k through 12 teachers to work with and that's my email address just put in the subject line you know k-12 teacher so that so that i know i know what the topic's about job seekers are still opportunities at um at tableau and jll is still looking and one of our own brandon why don't you tell us about what you've got going here yeah just in the chat too it looks like there are several several openings in the chat but um our role we we just uh we were looking for a junior analyst uh stinky diagram is not required so um if you don't can't build that do not worry um yeah if you've got any experience with tableau we have openings on our team we got lots of cool stuff happening we are implementing tableau at lp so big transition project ongoing lots of opportunity in power bi tableau alteryx the whole nine so lots of lots of room for growth over here uh eric you have something that you want to you want to talk about you're muted eric okay you're still my buddy [Laughter] i'm sure what eric's saying is fantastic phenomenal and everyone should sign up to work with him oh yeah okay i'm muted sorry but yeah our business analyst is open it took six months but uh it's finally there uh look for section of surgical sciences on the vanderbilt website or email me i put my email in the in the uh chat okay nick you've got something or maybe we should let let sarah talk about it yeah she might draw more attention they're tired of hearing from me now just in the chat i put a search link we have three analytics engineers uh positions open and that's working with tableau and sql server as well as stakeholders and solving cool problems like okay using same key diagrams too on occasion as if it calls for it okay john wilson you've got something yeah thank you i work in analytics at brookdale senior living and we have a manager role open right now that works pretty pretty closely with the tableau group but also uh potentially an analyst uh opening that'll that's not posted yet but uh uh are those here in nashville the network local remote okay so yeah based in nashville but work from home okay anybody else okay let's just talk real briefly about uh next month he said confidently okay next month the meeting is october 27th it's the 3 30 meeting now understand there's not going to be a meeting in november okay so we're going to have this meeting in october we're also going to have a meeting in december and i think nick's going to talk about that in just a second but uh we're going to have three speakers uh the community moment we're going to have uh quan clark from pivot technology talk to us about what they're doing here in nashville we're also going to have a segment on speed tipping by jeffrey shaffer and if if you don't know jeff jeff shaffer he is i made the comment he was a zen master when they were zen babies he is he's one of the the very old school uh real knowledgeable tableau people so it's a real honor to have him here and then we're gonna have a tech segment on uh tab scraper and brandon do you want to just say something about that and who's going to be making that presentation so it'll be likely either somebody from my team or just me myself but we are we've been working on some stuff internally at lp to build sentiment analysis uh using tap i so um that thing that's it's still in a state of development for us but we'll we'll sort of get everybody where we're at okay nick i'm going to stop sharing my screen now did you want to just uh explain what's going to happen in december i know you have to uh there you go december will be semi-social event you know it's towards the end of the year everybody will be doing lots of fun and different things family loved ones and such so hopefully we're on your list of loved ones and we will have a breakout session in the round we've done this a couple of times before and it was just really satisfying it was enjoyable i felt like it's the virtual equivalent of mingling you know talking to people about how you use tableau and and really just kind of being around the water cooler with fellow analysts or whatever you call yourselves because every title is a little different right it's really good i would encourage you to attend and there'll be more to come on our newsletter i don't even know what to call it the standing emails that you should be receiving hopefully okay invitations yep yes invitations thank you anyone that he wants to study for the october quiz i plan on doing it on colors colors with tableau we'll see how that goes but it's it's fall so there's a theme there okay katie sarah you guys were great today thank you so much spencer you were you were outstanding also something near and dear to my hardest sports but um katie and sarah great presentations today really really thank you for doing that we appreciate it

Channel: Tableau Software

Views: 197

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Visual data, Visual analytics, Business analysis, Business analytics, Business analytics tool, Data analytics tool, Data analytics, Analytics, Analytics platform, Business analytics platform, Business intelligence, Data analysis, Data visualization, Tableau, Tableau Software

Id: 7qaNu53ovfw

Length: 93min 7sec (5587 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 29 2021