Freakalytics®

Practical Analytics for Better Decisions

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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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Quick dashboard enhancements in Tableau, compact dashboards

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Tableau Tips: displaying growth rates in maps

A recent training attendee asked how to show year over year growth in a map. In particular, they wanted to use the Year over Year growth selection from the Quick Table Calculation menu. This simple dashboard

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Map dashboard, state budget shortfalls for 2011, just 30 minutes with Tableau

Time magazine recently published a map of state budget shortfalls for 2011 by state. While this was a good attempt, I thought it would be informative to show this data in Tableau to offer additional insight. The image of Time’s map is not as clear as a regular scanned image since I used my iPhone- taking the photo on a flight!

There are three primary areas for improvement

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Creating a data-driven culture in your company

A great summary of key requirements to build a data-driven culture, by Chris Stolte, Tableau co-founder:

1. Don’t fear the user,
2. Encourage corporate curiosity,
3. Manage to the outliers,
4. Measure, experiment and then measure again, and
5. Build trust and understanding.

I would add two more points, one of which Chris is too modest to state,

6. From my experience working at Netflix, no matter the level of decision-maker, ask them for the data to back up their decision and to examine the results of their decisions.
7. Deploy Tableau in your business- speed of insight is critical to the value of data in many business needs. Tableau quickly delivers beautiful insights that are understandable by all of your employees. There is no other application like it!

Read the article and see Chris’s comments first hand.

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Dashboard tips by example- viewing detailed tables beneath the data with Tableau Reader

Many students in class ask, “Is it possible for Tableau Reader to show the detailed data using View Data functionality available in Tableau Desktop?” The answer is no, this feature is not available in Tableau Reader.

However, while you can’t use View Data in Tableau Reader, you can

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Tableau Tips: Synchronizing Multiple Data Sources in a Tableau Dashboard

The setup
You have connected to more than one data source in your Tableau workbook, for example, your sales database in Oracle and a customer call database in SQL Server.  Tableau seamlessly allows you to connect to multiple data sources in one workbook.  Views developed from both data sources can be placed in a single dashboard.

However, if you try to use global filters or quick filters to synchronize the two data sources, you will find that it isn’t possible; only one data source can be linked to either.  In fact, the term “Global” filter in Tableau can be confounding, since it is only global to views using the current data source.  Global filters will not work with other data sources even if the data items have the same name!

The solution
As of Tableau 5.0 (released in 2009), a new feature

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