There is an amazing Viz of the day on 12/20/2016 showing the mortality rate change in USA on certain diseases. Excellently designed!

There are over 3142 counties on each of the 6 maps.  I would like to view some of the counties in details. So I added a mechanism to close in.

Cross Join is also called Cartesian Join. It's named after the great French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes. The original spelling of his family name is in two words: Des Cartes, therefore Cartesian.

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[Click here to find all my Sankey Chart series]

Zen Master Chris Love wrote a Sankey chart tutorial which is quite popular. Actually the Sigmoid-based Sankey chart was first introduced to the Tableau world by another Zen Master Jeffrey Shaffer. I am a recent convert of Sigmoid curve and love it.

In the current #MakeoverMonday project of the week 50, Ben Jones created a very nice viz. I like the layout in general. But I feel the map is hard to use as state index. As we know, on a natural map, the smaller states or countries get penalized visually.

Following previous post on Creating Sigmoid with 2 Rows of Data which is inspired by Rody Zakovich's post, I was looking for some interesting curves to apply the same trick.

[Click here to find all my Sankey Chart series]

Sigmoid function can provide a smooth curve connecting two points in space. We have seen it in a number of graphical representations such as Sankey chart or this one.

Given any two points, a Sigmoid curve can be drawn between the two.

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This is a sequel to my recent post: #TweakThursday 22: Ordering By Narrative. That one is focusing on dashboard tweaking. Here I would give details on ways of boosting a stacked area chart.

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[A sequel to this post: Boosting Stacked Area Chart]

I wrote a post called Ordering By Context before. In a recent Viz of The Day on 11/29/2016, I found that, a conspicuous narrative at the top of the chart, is labeled as "Bottom 90%".

A few days ago, the viz of the day on 11/22/2016 shows the bike usage in Philadelphia. Very nicely designed with a combination of route map, top 10 routes per bike station and daily usage heat maps.

The little things I would like to tweak are as follows.

[Had a great Tableau Conference in Austin Texas last week! Met great people. Learned a bunch. Now back to work.]

A dashboard on French election has won the viz of the day on 11/16/2016. It is quite simple but rich in information.

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There has been a calculation that is needed in market basket and correlation analysis. There is a KB article about the topic (by self-join) and I wrote a post about it before (by custom SQL).

Recently Łukasz Majewski has provided an ingenious solution using data densification. I am totally stumped.

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ASCII (and Unicode) characters can offer a variety of lightweight data marks. Judicious choices of context-sensitive data marks can create more interest in the eyes of the viewer and lead to better visualizations.

Especially in tooltips, we are limited to using ASCII/Unicode characters.

A little question about Markov Chain came up lately. That pushed me to have a closer look at what it does. I had a vague idea about it before. This time I understand it better.

I saw a question in StackOverflow where people seems favoring a solution in SQL.

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After a first-time visit to the village in Lichuan, Hubei, Central China where my grandpa was born, I am back. I gained some new perspectives on the changes in the past hundred years.

The Viz of the Day on 10/12/2016 is about the spells in Harry Potter books.

I met an issue that requires to show a cross tab table in full glory. However the default view may not be complete because of missing members in dimensions (Domain incomplete) and missing data.

Here is how the original data look like:

- There are only 4 valid data marks (Abc), out of possible 12.

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An alternative title could be "Highlighting without Ignoring the Rest of the Pack".

In a recent viz of the day, one member was highlighted against the rest. The rest was painted with the same grey color.

That doesn't show the rest of different players, which I found was not satisfactory.

Double congratulations to Rody Zakovich for being named a Tableau Zen Master of 2016-2017 and for winning the Viz of the Day on 9/9/2016! Rody deserves it absolutely! Rody has brought a great impact on the Tableau community in the last couple years, for which I am a witness.

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We may need to reuse the same data sources times and again in one project. We may need to clone a data source in different workbooks. Helas, there is no copy-n-paste option for data sources.

Most likely, one view of a dataset is not enough. Different graphical representations may have their own advantages and biases. Each would offer a partial set of insights from the dataset.

Currently a formula in Tableau can look plain and a bit boring:

I would suggest highlighting the syntax words like Case, When, Then, End etc.

This Monday's Viz of the Day (8/22/2016) is about malaria in Africa. This topic is dear to me in two ways:

- Last year in 2015, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was given to Ms.Youyou Tu of China for discovering artemisinin and dihydroartemisinin, used to treat malaria, which saved millions of lives.

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I wrote previously a post on how to count customers who bought both A and B. Today someone asked how to count those who all bought the same N items. N>=2. He specifically requires a multiple choice filter so that people can select some items and only those who bought them all are showing.

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A viz is a piece of application software that has data as input and graphics as output. In between we created a flow of logic. We may have all experienced buggy software in our life. It is part of the human nature that we have imperfections which are reflected in our creations.

From a thread in Linkedin's Tableau group and the included blog and viz, I found that people may not know how to correctly embed a Tableau Public viz in a web page. There are a few blog posts on embedding. But the Tableau Public has evolved and some new features are not covered. So here is my post.

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This may be obvious to others, but not to me. Only up to recently, I had to

- Click Add a New Data Source

- Refill server address, port number, database name, username, password

so that I can connect to a data source that I already have.

What is Likert scale? Here is the explanation.

Here is the wiki page on Likert Scale. Tableau Zen Master Steve Wexler is an expert on Likert scale visualization.

Today's Viz of the Day (8/10/2016) includes some survey data. It results from a simple yes-or-no Likert scale survey.

Tableau's default labeling of Pie chart is outside of the pie. But some may prefer to put the labels inside, which is not obvious.

There are 3 ways to do it, depends on what you need.

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Sorting data is always a must for presenting information. Data in disorder is of little value. Especially for data analysts, part of our added value is to put data in order.

Sort by what? In what order?

There are various dimensions to order by.

There came a question regarding "Lookup via Association". I have seen similar questions a while ago. I almost forgot how I solved them before. This time I will write it down.

Problem Statement

Given a customer who is from some state(s).

I saw this Viz on World War I in the Tableau forum and without a doubt, I nominated it for Viz of the Day by sending a message to public@tableau.com on 7/22. In the message, I didn't write anything but the link to the viz. On 7/25, it was selected as the Viz of the Day.

Here I will present an alternative solution to Tableau's Story Points. The main difference is that it can accommodate global filters. This feature has been asked by many users in the Tableau forum. Besides, the formatting option is much limited in Story Points. More have been asked for.

3

Just wrote a post on back-to-back chart tweaks last week in my #TweakThursday series. This week's #MakeoverMonday project presents a dataset in which we can apply the technique. The idea is to provide back to back comparison at a lower level of details.

Back-to-back bar chart (also called divergent bar chart) is visually appealing and intriguing, I have to admit. Its shape is dynamic, capricious and unpredictable. It may look like a tree, a pyramid, a wave depending on the data set.

Ben Jones of Tableau Software, the author of the book Communicating Data with Tableau, asked me if I can tweak his recent viz on the 50+ goals club of international soccer.

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The Viz of the Day on 7/13/2016 is the first one from an author in China that I have ever seen. Although some of the description is in Chinese, the viz is understandable by anyone who knows English.

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