Simply Copy-n-Paste, Baby!

My colleague Sandeep came over to tell me how marvelous a little trick I told him the other day is: copy and paste. Sandeep is an experienced Tableau designer and he has designed a few sophisticated dashboards. If he didn't know it, I thought it might be worthwhile to write it down. It's probably one of the least known productivity tricks in Tableau.

Import data fast

By Control-C and Control-V, one can minimize the time spent on data importing, data scaffolding and accelerate prototyping.

One can copy data from anywhere (such as Excel, Web, Notepad ...) and paste it into a blank worksheet. Tableau will take the data in tabular form while expecting the first row to be the column names. Data in Notepad are expected to be comma separated or having other delimiters.

Web Scraping

Web scraping is easier than ever. Any curious soul can try to import the data from this web page, into a Tableau worksheet, by copy and paste.

There are 2 data tables in this page:
http://www.premierleague.com/en-gb/news/news/2013-14/may/premier-league-broadcasting-commercial-payments.html

You can try to copy both tables into Tableau worksheets. You might have problem with the first table. [submitted a ticket to Tableau under case number 01117583] Its format may not be recognizable completely by Tableau. One of the rows is not correct. My solution is to paste the data to Excel first, then copy it and paste it to Tableau. Excel has a stronger capability to recognize web data tables than Tableau does. Hope that Tableau can catch up and save us a trip to Excel.

This way, we can do a quick analysis of any data we see on the web.

Build glue table

In an earlier post on Funnel Chart, I needed to build a glue table to bring data of different sources into a 4 phased table. Then I can build a funnel chart with dynamic data. Before this, we were looking for a way to union data and didn't find any solution.

To build the glue table, I typed 5 lines in a Notepad window:

Phase
Visits
Leads
Opportunities
Funded

Then pasted them into a Tableau worksheet. Now I got a single dimension Phase with 4 values, from which I built a glue table using calculated field, providing the formatted data to feed the funnel chart.

Create dynamic document

In my recent work, I needed to set up a help page alongside dashboards and worksheets. To give an explanation of high-value and low-value customers, I built a simple table by copy and paste these 3 lines to Tableau:

"Customer Value"

High

Low

Then use calculated field to generate a dynamic description according to a value parameter:

If [Customer Value]="High" then "Customer value >=" + STR( [Value Parameter] )
Elseif [Customer Value]="Low" then "Customer value < " + STR( [Value Parameter] )
End

The advantage of such a dynamic document is:
1. Editable within Tableau (in calculated field)
2. Bring structure to the text
3. Embed any data variable in the text (much more flexible than using Insert)

You probably can find more interesting cases to use copy and paste. Have fun!

(Refresh the page if you want to view the gif image multiple times. Or go to Tableau Public and click the button at the top-right corner.)

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.

View comments

Vizible Difference

In search of data visualization excellence

1. Sheet with a single data mark.

2. Create an show/hide button

3. Add annotations

Add a comment