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
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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
26 Ways to Enhance your Tables in Tableau
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
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
Tableau’s New Relationships and What They Mean
Tableau’s New Relationships and What They Mean The release of Tableau 2020.2 has a lot of cool new features, but perhaps none are more game changing than the implementation of relationships into the data model. There have been many conversations … Read More
Getting COVID-19 Data from the Web with Tableau Prep
How to webscrape COVID-19 using Tableau Prep This blogpost is upcoming but I wanted to provide those from the GovTUG access to it early! Tableau Prep Workflow Get JHU Data – R Script Calculate Daily values – R Script Calculate … Read More
So you Want to Build Alteryx Macros (Part 1)
So You Want to Build Alteryx Macros (Part 1) I was first introduced to Alteryx in January 2019 and instantly recognized the incredible power of the tool. If I had Alteryx in previous jobs, it would have saved me from … Read More
Top Five : Power BI Features That Will (Tab)Blow Your Mind
Top Five Power BI Features That Will (Tab) Blow Your Mind There are a ton of cool features in Power BI that you may not be familiar with, even if you have been using the tool for a long time. … Read More
Analytic Process Automation: Why APA is not just for Alteryx
Analytic Process Automation (APA) Here to stay, and why this matters to you Warning: hyperlinks and references to space travel await you… Since you’re reading this, it’s very likely you saw Alteryx’s huge announcement last week of their launch of … Read More
Ultimate Guide to Tables in Tableau, Part 5: Headers
Ultimate Guide to Tables in Tableau: Headers Part 5: Custom Headers When you think about tables in general, we often don’t think about the importance that the header provides. The header can be more than a title. It can provide … Read More
Using Custom Shapes in Tableau
Using Shapes in Tableau If you’re like me, nothing excites me like bringing a dashboard to life using proper shapes and colors. In this blog post I will show you three different techniques on how to implement shapes into your … Read More
Ultimate Guide to Tables in Tableau, Part 4: Filtering
Ultimate Guide to Tables in Tableau: Filtering with Tables Part 4: Filters with Tables So you’ve built a table. That probably means you need a bunch of filters to go with the table. These filters can be cumbersome, steal valuable … Read More
Top Five : Things I’ve Learned About Tableau Recently
Things I’ve Learned About Tableau Recently I like to think I know a lot about Tableau but when I read a post by Ken Flerlage, or see a #WorkoutWednesday by Luke Stanke, I realize there is so much more to … Read More
TEXT INPUT | ALTERYX 2-MINUTE TOOLS
TEXT INPUT | ALTERYX 2-MINUTE TOOLS This week, we are going to learn how to use the Text Input tool to bring in simple, usually one-time, data sets into your workflow. Yep. I am excited too. The Text Input Tool … Read More
Ultimate Guide to Tables in Tableau, Part 3: Row Density
Ultimate Guide to Tables in Tableau: Row Density Part 3: Row Density In this post we continue our ultimate guide to tables in Tableau by discussing how to change the number of rows displayed in a table using Tableau. As … Read More
Ultimate Guide to Tables in Tableau, Part 2: Pagination
Ultimate Guide to Tables in Tableau: Pagination Part 1: Pagination In this post we continue our ultimate guide to tables in Tableau by discussing how to create pagination in Tableau. Sometimes our tables are too long in Tableau–and sometimes we … Read More
AGGREGATE CONSUMER PURCHASES | WEEKLY CHALLENGE #8 | I CAN ALTERYX THAT
AGGREGATE CONSUMER PURCHASES | WEEKLY CHALLENGE #8 | I CAN ALTERYX THAT In this week’s challenge, our goal is to take a large table of consumer orders and aggregate them to evaluate the feasibility of creating a new “meal deal.” … Read More