Vizible Difference

The Problem

Following a question in Tableau Forum, I provided a solution.

The problem can be stated as follows:

Given a number of devices operating during a day, the requirement is to count the number of devices per amount of total time in operation. The question is like, how many devices operated below 10 minutes a day? how many 10-20 minutes? etc.

Wondering if there are solutions to similar problems, I googled and found that it's a fairly common problem as stated in:

http://www.theinformationlab.co.uk/2013/06/24/histograms-on-aggregate-measures/

http://community.tableau.com/thread/139950

where solutions are also provided. They are all using table calculations.

I have to admit that table calculation is one of the most dreaded functions in Tableau. Otherwise the most.

In Tableau forum, Danny Lee asked a question: How to blend two data sources, Salesforce and Amazon RedShift by country?  The blending request sounds reasonable. What's problem?

The problem is that the countries are in different notations: One is in short format, and the other is in long format.

The Good

Publishing data sources to the server allows us to

- Centralize data sources (much like a data mart)

- Share them with all the authenticated users

- Reduce workbook sizes

- Increase workbook publishing/upload speed

- Schedule data refresh with fixed frequency

The Insufficient

However,the published data sources are not so easy to use. A number of product defects or design oversights could have hindered the adoption of server-based data sources.

Tableau Online is a cloud service for data visualization by Tableau Software. According to this article:

http://kb.tableau.com/articles/howto/live-data-connection-ip-addresses

it shows that Tableau Online's IP range is 66.35.252.0-24

Click the link Online Visual Traceroute and at the bottom, you will see where it is pointing to. It ends up at google.com.  You can test any IP from the above range at http://www.monitis.com/

So it is hosted by Google.

Alteryx is a very cool ETL tool, the new kid in the block. New to me alone maybe. In combination with Tableau, it can help us streamline our data workflow and automate data visualization, especially for up to date monitoring.

We build Alteryx modules to extract data from database into .tde files (Tableau Data Extract file format), which are similar to data marts. Then those modules are scheduled to run daily and overwrite the old .tde files.

Dual axis is a great yet succinct way of showing two sets of measures in contrasting or complementary styles. It is a must have in our viz design arsenal.

I noticed sometimes one may choose to use dual axis while it is not necessary. Here I try to share some thoughts about when to dual axis and when not to.

When not to dual axis

When needing to display two measures in the same chart, intuitively one starts using dual axis.