Freakalytics.com- Thoughts

Bringing clarity out of an infographic, “Income Inequality in the US” from Mother Jones

A colleague shared this Mother Jones infographic, which attempts to explain the disparity in income between richer and poorer families in the US. The data is indeed fascinating, but quite difficult to read in their flashy infographic.

There are two major issues that hinder understanding when viewing this infographic:

1) Using areas of circles to encode the incomes is very difficult for most people to interpret. Additionally, with the difference in income being so large, it is nearly impossible to fit this on a normally sized web page. The largest group, the yellow circle, is mostly cut off in their infographic.

2) The infographic is overloaded

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Everyday analytics, “The Accidental Analyst”

This is it, the book that Tableau Software was so enthusiastic about that they bought a prepublication copy for each attendee of their annual Customer Conference last Fall. Now, you can pick up your own copy of “The Accidental Analyst“, available in May of 2012.

It isn’t just Tableau that is excited to see this book released, Stephen Few also had great things to say about it. Here is Stephen’s quote from the back cover, “This is a wonderful book, filled with practical advice. Business people who are struggling to make sense of their data will find it accessible and directly applicable to their work—a great resource for building analytical prowess.”

If you already pre-ordered a copy of the book, you will need to place your order again. Please visit this page again soon for the link to purchase it. The previous links and order information have been superceded by this version.

Want to hear more about the book?

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Rapid Graphs with Tableau Software 7 now available on Amazon, Kindle and Nook

Buy the Kindle version at Amazon, just $9.97! (free preview)

Buy Nook book at Barnes & Noble, just $9.97! (free preview)

Buy the print version at Amazon

International shipping alternative to Amazon

Still using Tableau 6? Yes! You can buy the 6 version!

Tired of boring spreadsheets and data overload from confusing graphs? Master the art of rapid graphs with Tableau! Tableau is designed with one goal in mind, to give you the power to quickly explore and understand your data so that you can make informed decisions in a wide variety of real-world situations. After learning Tableau, you will be able to communicate your findings with audience-friendly graphs and tables.

“A picture is worth a thousand words” is a common saying that is more relevant today

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Tableau customer profile, Eystein from Norway, Banking & Insurance

Customer
Eystein from Norway

Favorite quote speaking with him
“Make it simple and fast, my IT team was cheering on Tableau after trying it and QlikView. They really hoped we would pick Tableau and I am very happy we did.”

Situation
Eystein recently took over a BI team that wanted to accelerate use of data across every area of the bank and subsidiaries. The bank and subsidiaries are heavy users of SAS Enterprise Guide, SAS Web Report Studio and SAS Enterprise Miner.

They have a variety of data sources and data marts throughout the business. There is also a centralized Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) effort that is making headway, but has a long list of items ahead of them. In the meantime, SAS users are rapidly creating new data pulls that Eystein would like to use in Tableau. He realizes that the EDW team will never be able to have all the data that is needed by the business, so SAS is a good platform to prep the data for widespread analysis in Tableau.

Status

They recently evaluated fast analytic tools from

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Newspapers of Spain dashboard for Tableau Customer Conference 2012

In honor of our beautiful host country, Spain, we have created a dashboard of the major newspapers available in Spain by city, circulation and whether it is in Catalan (the language of this area in Spain.) This dashboard was created in just 30 minutes with Tableau and a glass of Spanish wine at our side! In just 30 minutes! Okay, we get carried away but Tableau has this conference just once a year!

This dashboard is making us realize we need to find some data on Spanish winery location for our visit after the conference. We hope you enjoy this dashboard and the conference!

All the best,
Eileen and Stephen McDaniel

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Detailed review of Tableau Data Blending by a PhD Student at UW- Seattle

Detailed review of Tableau Data Blending by PhD Student at UW- Seattle From the article conclusions:

“Data blending is a new feature in Tableau that simpliﬁes the process of integrating data from a variety of heterogeneous sources. We presented several compelling customer applications that leverage the feature and highlight its usefulness for interactive visual analysis. Additionally, we are engaging with our customers to improve the ﬂexibility and capabilities of the feature. Ultimately, our goal is to make it easier for users to discover and combine data that will help them in their exploratory analysis.”

If you are a data enthusiast who actually enjoys data management and warehousing, you will find this article fascinating and informative.

However, if you are still learning Tableau and want to understand this and related features, here is an excerpt from the section on Data Blending in our book, Rapid Graphs with Tableau Software:

“A common reality for many users of Tableau is that their data is stored in multiple systems, such as Excel, Access, CSV files, Oracle databases and many other database systems. Early versions of Tableau <!–more–>allowed you to connect to multiple data sources at one time in the same workbook, but NOT in the same view. In other words, if you had budget data in your Excel data source and actual spending data in Oracle, you had no automated way to make a view comparing budget with actuals. Recent versions of Tableau allow you to blend your data to help you solve similar problems.

The following example uses the Country Blending …”

To download the article, “Dynamic Workload Driven Data Integration in Tableau” by Kristi Morton, Ross Bunker, Jock Mackinlay, Robert Morton and Chris Stolte, click here.

To learn how to use Data Blending in Tableau and create great analysis quickly, preview Rapid Graphs here.