We are getting used to divide our time into years, months, weeks etc. This dictates many aspects of our life. We accept it without questioning and just go along with it.

Among all the date scales, month is kind of particular. It is not related to any natural/astronomical phenomenon, neither to moon activity nor to woman's menstrual cycle. Although initially named after the moon, it evolved to be irrelevant. Lunar calendar (still used in China and many parts of the world) is a much better representation of the moon periodicity.

Nowadays, month has taken a monstrous importance in the life of humanity because it dictates our financial life. Anything that has to do with money, is in monthly installment: salary, rent, mortgage, alimony... We become accustomed to everything monthly since money is such a crucial factor. (Update: my current employer just decided to pay us bi-weekly starting 2015! It makes accounting so much easier.)

It so happened that some of our operation monitoring dashboards are dictated by monthly views. It doesn't have to be so. Not for everything. For data center activity monitoring purposes, it really doesn't have to be so. Internet activities are not really showing any sign of monthly periodicity. A rolling multi-weekly calendar is much more interesting.

For example, a monthly view may show only 1 day worth of data in the beginning of the month, or a few more days, leaving the rest of the month blank. Instead, a rolling 5-week calendar consistently shows 30-day-ish worth of data. It just takes as much space on your report canvas. It is a better use of the screen real estate. Initially, I thought a 5-week view would suffice to cover a regular month. Later, I realized that a month may span over 6 weeks. So, I decided to use a rolling 6-weekly calendar to replace the monthly calendar in my report view.

6-Weekly Rolling Calendar

Monthly Calendar





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Jake and I collaborated on a dashboard. He told me that he learnt a way to create an in-place help page in Tableau. He first saw it at a conference somewhere and couldn't recall who the speaker was. So I am blogging here about it but the credit goes to somebody else. If anyone knows who the original creator is, leave a comment below.

The key idea is to float a semi transparent worksheet on top of the dashboard, where a help text box is strategically placed on top of each chart. This way, we can explain how to view each chart and what data points are important, etc. This worksheet is collapsible by a show/hide button. 

Below I would like to show how this worksheet can be constructed.

1. Sheet with a single data mark.

  • Double click the empty space in Marks panel and add two single quotes. Make the null pill a text label. This creates a single null mark.
  • Set the view as "Entire View"

2. Create an show/hide button

  • Go to the target dashboard
  • Drag a floating vertical container to the dashboard, making it cover all the area of interest.
  • Drag the Single Null Mark sheet and drop it into the above container. Hide the sheet title.
  • Create an open/close button for the container and place the button at the top-right corner.

3. Add annotations

  • Format the sheet background opacity as 70% in the layout manager             
  • Select area annotations and place them anywhere of interest. 
  • Write help text and format it to highlight important messages.  
  • The text can serve as functional guide and/or insight guide.

Here is an example. Feel free to download the workbook and explore. Click the "i" button at the top-right corner to view the in-place help. 

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