26 Ways to Enhance Tables in Tableau If you develop dashboards and work with data visualizations regularly, then you probably find yourself loathing the moment you are asked for a table of data. You probably think to yourself: “why do … Read More
Articles
Our Thoughts
Looking for formal Tableau or Alteryx Training?
Skip the workshop and learn online over 8 weeks with the support of a coach and a cohort with our Data Coach Platform.
or check out Data Coach on YouTube
Toggling Views with Bookmarks in Power BI
Toggling Views with Bookmarks in Power BI Bookmarks are one of my favorite features in Power BI because they allow for a lot of great customization options for user experience. In this blog, I am going to show you how … Read More
Alteryx 2020.4
Alteryx 2020.4 What’s New? In the following, we’ll examine some of our favorite features that in the newest release of Alteryx – let’s get into it! Alteryx Designer We’re at the last main release for Alteryx in 2020, and while … Read More
Switching Metrics in Power BI
Switching Metrics in Power BI To avoid having multiple tabs with the same charts, but different metrics, you have to get a little creative in Power BI. This blog will walk you through how to enable this toggle functionality in … Read More
Building an Executive Dashboard in Tableau
Building an Executive Dashboard in Tableau Over the course of 2020, I’ve put out more than 25 blog posts. If you had taken the time to read and learn from each blog you would be able to create a one-of-a-kind … Read More
Connecting Jira to Snowflake using Fivetran
Connecting Jira to Snowflake with Fivetran This post is a continuation of the series that examines the simplification of data integration leveraging Fivetran and Snowflake. Fivetran nearly eliminates the development time required to ingest data from a vast number of … Read More
Alteryx Server 101: Organizing Content in the Alteryx Gallery
Alteryx Server 101: Organizing Content in the Alteryx Gallery Just got Alteryx Server at your organization? Get ready for some serious time saving when you automate your work! Server is a fantastic product, but the Gallery has a whole language … Read More
KPI Design Ideas for Tableau
KPI Design Ideas Here are 15 ideas and sources of inspiration for designing your KPIs for Tableau For a very long while I’ve been collecting KPI design ideas. Specifically, I wanted to include. For all the examples I am using … Read More
What-if Analysis in Power BI
https://www.tessellationtech.io/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/2020-09-29-17-48-11_Trim.mp4 What-if Analysis in Power BI Leveraging parameters in Power BI can take your scenario planning to the next level. In the example below, we are using mock model output of a linear regression model to perform a what-if analysis … Read More
Alteryx Server: Workflow Credentials
Alteryx Gallery Workflow Credentials Picture this: your company just got Alteryx Server. You are dazzled by the idea of scheduling your workflows and sharing your analytic apps. You publish your perfectly-working workflow, which utilizes an excel file hosted on a … Read More
Fact of Fact Analysis Using Power Query
Fact of Fact Analysis in Power Query Building a data model in Power BI can be extremely easy. When primary keys match foreign keys one to one and when tables are built with a star schema in mind, things go … Read More
Optimizing Power BI Reports
Optimizing Power BI Reports Building performant reports is important in gaining trust with stakeholders and ensuring user adoption. Here are some practical and easy tips on how to optimize your Power BI reports! These tips will be broken down into … Read More
Custom Sorting in Power BI
Custom Sorting in Power BI Building charts in Power BI is really easy, but implementing specific features within that chart can be difficult. One of the most common requirements that I’ve had to work on being a Power BI consultant … Read More
Tableau Isotype Plots
Isotype Plots in Tableau What are Isotype Plots? Isotype plots are a blend of visual language that emphasizes quantitative data with symbolism that is often associated with descriptive imagery. If you wanted to simplify it its very similar to a … Read More
Tableau Regression Models
Regression Models in Tableau Tableau recently released the MODEL_QUANTILE() and MODEL_PERCENTILE() functions in Tableau Desktop 2020.3. These are game-changing for Tableau. They finally put regression output directly in the hands of Tableau developers. Specifically, MODEL_QUANTILE() allows any creator to calculate … Read More
Analytics 101: Descriptive, Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics
Analytics 101: Descriptive, Predictive, and Prescriptive Analytics One thing I’ve learned in my time as a data scientist has been that the term “analytics” means something different to just about anyone you talk to. Answers I’ve gotten ranged from basic … Read More
Creating Power BI Dashboard with Custom Images & Icons
Creating Power BI Dashboard with Custom Images & Icons A great way to tie all of your Power BI reports together in your Power BI Service workspace is to create a great looking dashboard that can serve as a landing … Read More
Tableau 2020.3 – Write to Database in Tableau Prep
Tableau 2020.3 – Write to Database in Tableau Prep This post is the fifth in a series of posts examining a whole host of game changing Tableau features that have been released in 2020. In the previous edition of this … Read More
Alteryx 2020.3
Alteryx 2020.3 What’s New? In the following, we’ll examine some of our favorite features that are in the newest release of Alteryx – let’s get into it! Alteryx Designer To me, it appears that the last few releases really indicate … Read More
Tableau 2020.2 – Relationships
Tableau 2020.2 – Relationships This post is the fourth in a series of posts examining a whole host of game-changing Tableau Desktop features that have been released in 2020. In the last post we discussed the nuances of Set Controls. In … Read More
Tableau 2020.2 – Set Controls
Tableau 2020.2 – Set Controls This post is the third post in a series examining a whole host of game-changing Tableau Desktop features that have been released in 2020. In the previous post in this series, we covered Viz Animations from the … Read More
Tableau 2020.1 – Viz Animations
Tableau 2020.1 – Viz Animations This post is the second in a series examining a whole host of game changing Tableau Desktop features that have been released in 2020. In the last edition of this series we covered Dynamic Parameters. In … Read More
Tableau 2020.1 – Dynamic Parameters
Tableau 2020.1 – Dynamic Parameters There have been a ton of game changing features released by Tableau in 2020, so this post will be the first in a series of blog posts dedicated to exploring some of the newly released … Read More
The Easiest Way to Webscrape Tweets with Python
UPDATE: Since this blog post was published, it seems that the key package used, GetOldTweets3, has been degraded and is no longer able to be imported or installed. I am looking into this issue. For now, I recommend looking into … Read More
GOTTA CATCH ‘EM ALL! | WEEKLY CHALLENGE #215 | I CAN ALTERYX THAT
GOTTA CATCH ‘EM ALL | WEEKLY CHALLENGE #215 | I CAN ALTERYX THAT Everyone knows and loves Pokemon. From the adorable Pikachu to the also adorable Cubone, they’re all just so cute. In this week’s challenge, your goal is to … Read More
Understanding Tableau’s IN Function
Understanding Tableau’s IN Function On 8/12/2020, Tableau released Tableau Desktop version 2020.3 that included some fun new features, including Write to Database in Tableau Prep, Export to Crosstab Button, and the IN function. There are lots of great new features … Read More
Top 5 Power BI Features That Saved Me This Week
Top 5 New Power BI Features That Saved Me This Week Power BI is such a powerful tool, but every week that goes by makes me realize that I haven’t come close to realizing it’s full potential! Every week I … Read More
Trellis Chart in Tableau
Trellis Chart in Tableau Consider the following line chart that shows total sales by quarter over four years and is broken down by the 17 sub-categories. Pretend you are someone in your audience for this plot. Their response will be: … Read More
Pop Out Side Bars in Tableau
Pop Out Container Side Bars in Tableau This blog will show you how to use containers to create pop-out side bars in your Tableau dashboards. Side bars allow you to display extra information or context around a data point, but … Read More
Report Page Tooltips in Power BI
Report Page Tooltips in Power BI It can be a struggle to fit all the details you want displayed about a certain data point in your report. Often, it’s getting to that next level of your data’s granularity that can … Read More
Page Navigation in Power BI
Page Navigation in Power BI When building a Power BI report, odds are that all of the information you want to display will not fit on one page. Because of this, it is important to provide an intuitive way for … Read More
U.S. MILITARY & HIGH POINTS | WEEKLY CHALLENGE #214 | I CAN ALTERYX THAT
U.S. MILITARY & HIGH POINTS | WEEKLY CHALLENGE #214 | I CAN ALTERYX THAT In this week’s challenge, we have two data sets and three goals. One of the data sets, MIRTA Sites, is ready for analysis. The other data … Read More
Top 5 Beginner Tableau Design Tips
Beginner Design Tips When I started as a consultant, I was confident in my technical skills but dashboard design was not something that came naturally to me. To help me practice, Luke Stanke pretended to be the manager at Superstore … Read More
Power BI Report Guides
Power BI Report Guides Providing your users enough information about how to navigate and understand your report while maintaining a clean user interface is a common battle for report developers. Giving your users too much text and notations can come … Read More
Adding Up and Down Arrows to KPIs in Power BI
Adding Up and Down Arrows to KPIs in Power BI A common way to show time period changes in your KPI dashboards is to show metric indicators in the form of up and down triangles colored by the direction (+/-) of … Read More
How to Build a Click to Drill-down Pivot Table in Tableau
How to Build a Click to Drill-down Table in Tableau The following post is a part of a series looking at different options for mimicking Pivot Tables in Tableau: Building Pivot Tables in Tableau Series This option uses Parameter Actions … Read More
How to Build a Dynamic Drill-down Table in Tableau
How to Build a Dynamic Drill-down Table in Tableau The following post is a part of a series looking at different options for mimicking Pivot Tables in Tableau: Building Pivot Tables in Tableau Series. This option is great for situations … Read More
How to Build a Pivot Table in Tableau
How to Build a Pivot Table in Tableau Microsoft Excel will always hold a special place in my heart. Learning how to automate excel through VBA is what made me interested in coding and eventually lead me to Tableau. A … Read More
Tableau Sales Funnel Template
Tableau Sales Funnel Template The Template Here’s the TL;DR version: Making a funnel chart takes time. Making a beautiful chart takes even more time. Here’s a template for you to automate everything. And here’s the original data. How to use … Read More
So You Want to Build Alteryx Macros (Part 4)
So You Want to Build Alteryx Macros (Part 4) This is Part 4 of a four-part series covering macros in Alteryx. In this post, I will walk you through how to build an iterative macro in Alteryx. An iterative macro … Read More
CONNECT IN-DATABASE | ALTERYX 2-MINUTE TOOLS
CONNECT IN-DATABASE | ALTERYX 2-MINUTE TOOLS Sometimes, the performance of our underlying data sets is just plan bad. How do we address that? Well, we can utilize the underlying power of our data servers to do the processing for use! … Read More
Dashboard Design Essentials: KPI Templates
Dashboard Design Essentials – KPI Templates I am super excited to introduce another addition to the Dashboard Design Essentials series with this post on business dashboard KPI designs featuring work in Power BI. We will be covering how to design BANs, … Read More
Dashboard Design Essentials: Dashboard Layout & Formatting
Dashboard Design Essentials: Dashboard Layout & Formatting If you’re reading this post I guess you made it through Part I of the Dashboard Design Essentials series! If you haven’t already read that post, make sure to check it out as … Read More
Dashboard Design Essentials: Basics of Design
Dashboard Design Essentials: Basics of Design This post is the first in a series of posts aimed at providing resources to organizations and dashboard developers to help bring their dashboards to life regardless of what BI tool they use. Basic … Read More
Using M to Create a Custom Function for Web Scraping in Power BI
Using M to Create a Custom Function for Web Scraping Last month I posted a blog to my website titled Web Scraping in Power BI that showed users how to connect to web data in Power BI using a report that I … Read More
So You Want to Build Alteryx Macros (Part 2)
So You Want to Build Alteryx Macros (Part 2) This is Part 2 of a four-part series covering macros in Alteryx. In this post, I’ll walk you through how to build a standard macro in Alteryx. In a previous job, … Read More
Web Scraping in Power BI
Web Scraping in Power BI Scraping data from a website in Power BI is SO EASY. Let me say it one more time. Grabbing data from a website’s HTML in Power BI is so ridiculously easy it’ll make you mad. … Read More
Six Uses for a Transparent Shape in Tableau
Six Uses for Transparent Shapes in Tableau Sometimes you need to include custom shapes for your visualizations. One useful trick in Tableau is including a completely transparent, single-pixel image as a shape on dashboards and worksheets. This shape is extremely … Read More
Snowflake/Tableau Hackathon
First (Hopefully Annual) Snowflake / Tableau Hackathon This past Wednesday, Tessellation / Data Coach partnered with the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota to host a hackathon event, using Snowflake and Tableau as the core tools. Around … Read More
How to LAG in Tableau Prep
How to LAG in Tableau Prep In a recent project, we wanted to know: Is the average number of days between orders increasing or decreasing across the company? The questions behind that question are: What is the number of days … Read More