Basic Introduction to what Graph Analytics is…
Analytics is usually applied to structured, unstructured, numeric, or visual data to uncover decision driving insights.
Graph analytics is a relatively new area for analytics which refers to analysis applied on graph-based data.
Graph analytics (also called network analysis) as its name suggests is an analysis based amongst entities or graph nodes which could be products or customers or operations or even devices. Organizations and companies around the world are beginning to implement graph analytics to help uncover impactful insights in the field of marketing, fraud detection, supply chain, and search engine optimization and the like.
What is a Butterfly / Tornado Chart and How to Build them in Tableau
What is the Butterfly / Tornado chart?
Butterfly charts, also called Tornado or Divergent Chart, are essentially bar charts comparing two differing metrics at a time. In these visuals, data categories are listed out vertically with the bars of differing metrics extending horizontally, on both ends of the listed categories, resembling the butterfly wings. An example of this can be seen below.
The butterfly charts come in handy while comparing two data sets or metrics which are contrasting in nature such as male-female, positive-negative, and the like.
These charts are also a great alternative to the regular bar/stacked bar charts regularly used in reporting.
Examples of Butterfly / Tornado Chart
Tableau Pro Tip: How to let your users dynamically Swap Visuals on your Tableau Dashboard
One of the techniques, perhaps, widely used to create rich, interactive yet clutter-free dashboards is sheet swapping.
Sheet swapping essentially involves, dynamically swapping of one view to display another.
This brief article will walk you through, how to enable your dashboard users to swap visuals in real-time using containers in Tableau.
Step 1: Make your visuals/charts/views
I’ve created a simple scatter plot and a Bar plot as below.
What are Sankey charts and how to create them in Tableau
“ Stories are just data with Soul “ — Dr. Brene Brown
What is a Sankey Chart?
Sankey chart named after the Irish Captain Matthew Henry Phineas Riall Sankey, who used this type of visual in 1898 shown below representing the energy efficiency of a steam engine.
Sankey diagrams are essentially, flow diagrams, which highlight flows in a system. Flows could be energy, costs, materials etc, depending on your use case. They are instrumental in drawing the viewers’ attention to chief contributors of the flow.
Below is an example of what a Sankey diagram looks like
A step by step guide on removing the ‘Abc’ populated column from your visuals. 4 different ways you can get rid of the ‘Abc’ column in Tableau.
How to remove the ‘Abc’ column? - might be the most commonly asked Tableau question.
If you are a regular Tableau user, you would have invariably, come across a situation wherein you have had a column with ‘Abc’ listed out in your visual like below, and no matter what you do, this column just wouldn’t get erased.
Tableau Desktop Specialist Exam Resources — Courses, Practice Questions links and a 15 day Schedule
Tableau is currently the most popular data visualization software in the market today. Its popularity is rightly validated by the value it provides across industries and organizations.
Tableau shines as a Business Intelligence software providing high-quality visualization analytics and has been noted as BI platform leader in Gartner’s magic quadrant two years in a row (2020 and 2019) as seen below.
Data Cleaning with Tableau Prep — its features and functionalities
“I kind of have to be the master of cleaning, extracting and trusting my data before I do anything with it” — Scott Nicholson
Data professionals spend the majority of their time, cleaning data, before working on it any further, hence it becomes imperative to choose powerful data cleaning tools.
Tableau Prep Builder is a tool in the Tableau suite of products, aimed at providing functionalities for data preparation. Tableau Prep is designed to help you shape and clean your data for your analysis in Tableau.
Tableau prep allows the user to curate the data, before analyzing or visualizing it…
A quick read on what Agile entails
“ The fundamental unit of work in agile transformation is creating the environment for agile to be able to operate “ — Mike Cottmeyer, CEO, LeadingAgile, LLC
Wikipedia states ‘In software development, Agile approaches development requirements and solutions through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams and their customer(s)/end user(s). It advocates adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, and continual improvement, and it encourages flexible responses to change.’
While the above is true, Agile in its truest sense is more of a mindset than a methodology or process. Agile focuses on:
- Not just a different way of working…
Putting power in the hands of the user. Using Parameters to make dashboards more interactive and efficient.
“ The key is, no matter what story you tell, make the Buyer, the Hero” — Chris Brogan
One of the most attractive characteristics of Tableau is its intuitive and user-friendly features that allow users to gain control of their reports. One such powerful feature is that of Parameters.
Parameters allow the creator or user to prepare for varied scenarios, allowing users to pass in values to modify the visualization in question. Here the user or audience is in the position to control the input to see the parameter effect on the visualization.
Tableau defines parameters as ‘a global placeholder…
Chronicles of Human Memory and how Data Visualization has a crucial role to play
Us humans, see or interpret information in our minds, and memory is a crucial part of how we humans perceive the world around us.
We have three types of memory capacities that can be leveraged to curate better visualizations ensuring insights drawn from the visuals are more efficient and insightful.
Types of Memory
- Sensory Memory
- Short-Term Memory
- Long-Term Memory
