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Quick tutorial on reference lines, bands and distributions – enhance your graph insights!

The following article features Tableau 6

Reference lines, bands or distributions may be added to your views to emphasize particular values or areas that may be useful in interpreting your data. In particular, when comparing multiple groups or categories of data, reference lines and bands provide immediate feedback on the overall differences between the groups.

Reference lines

Reference lines are vertical or horizontal lines displayed on your view that mark requested values such as average, median, minimum, maximum, sum, total and constants (such as a line that separates the data points as being above or below a target). They can be added on any continuous axis.

1) Open the Sample – Coffee Chain (Access) data source included by default with Tableau 6

2) Place Sales on the Columns shelf and change the aggregate to Average.

3) Place Product on the Rows shelf,
     State and Date on the Level of Detail shelf
     and format Date to ‘MMMM YYYY’.

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The Seven Developers of Tableau 7 – Tableau Customer Conference 2011

Chris Stolte, Chief Development Officer at Tableau introduced
Six senior developers on stage for a preview of Tableau 7.

Chris Stolte

Tableau’s mission is help people see and understand their data.

139 1 photo 1 7
How much simpler can it get?

Tableau was started while

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Tableau 6 – how it can change your world

The following article features Tableau 6

Power

Whether you are exploring your data for new insights, answering specific questions or even deciding what questions to ask, Tableau gives you unprecedented control to investigate, communicate and take action with the valuable information hidden in your data! Tableau has it all – a wide variety of options to graph your data, the ability to adjust your data so that you are using the right data in the right form for the questions at hand, and a user-friendly interface that’s designed around how people think about analysis, allowing you to follow your thoughts as you question and explore your data. You can work with every major data source, from Excel workbooks to the largest databases. You can even extract data from larger sources into a local “extract” file that will make your data exploration more efficient and allow offline analysis when you are away from the office.

Profit and planned profit by product
Red is below plan, green is above
Percentage is actual versus plan
Black line in 2010 shows prior year profit amount

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Displaying profit versus sales by region and customer segment Average profit ratio = size of bubble;
Minimum and maximum percents labeled per region
Colors are customer segments

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Dashboards podcast for journalists- ideas & examples with Journalytics

Episode Overview: Hosted by Journalytics, we discuss the utilities and pleasantries of Data Visualization and Dashboards. During our conversation we discuss several specific examples of dashboards in the news. Click here to listen on the Journalytics web site.

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Microstrategy stock price relative to IPO and historic low-point

 

 
 

 

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Stephen Few versus David McCandless- we should leave playing doctor to the children

McCandless, mountains out of mole hills

Here is my response to Nathan’s article, “Business intelligence vs. infotainment“, on Flowing Data.  Nathan’s article was in response to Stephen’s earlier article on Perceptual Edge, “Teradata, David McCandless, and yet another detour for analytics“.

 
 
 
 
 

We should leave “playing doctor” to the children

In considering this great debate, perhaps we should step back and consider another field, medicine.  For centuries, medicine was guided by wishes, fantasy and misguided ideas of what would heal people.  One of my favorite examples is “trephining” (drilling holes in your head) to release the evil spirits that have made the patient ill.  Of course, for a very small percent of patients, this proved helpful.  However, most ended up no better and typically much worse for their procedure.

I feel that McCandless work is “fun” and vibrant, but

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MIT Sloan Review, don’t allow pies to obscure the “New Intelligence” you hope to share

MIT Sloan Review, don't allow pies to obscure the New Intelligence you hope to share

I was very interested to read the survey results from MIT about data access challenges facing business analysts. The article states that “The New Intelligent Enterprise… will allow you to do some immediate benchmarking — and see how your organization is doing in relation to your peers.” While I am certain the data from this survey can indeed be useful in meeting their objective, I am also certain that their initial chart selection makes this difficult to easily see and understand.

 

In an effort to demonstrate how they can make their upcoming report much more informative

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Examining data over time, part 1- Netflix stock price history presented 7 ways

Freakalytics Netflix NFLX Stock Price Growth as bars

It is fascinating how much information you can uncover with just a few years of price data in Tableau. In this example, we use just two data items to examine the history of Netflix stock price (NASDAQ NFLX.) The data items used are date and closing price, adjusted for splits.

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