Blog

Dashboard icons – pick one set, and use it well

2026-10-02 by Johan de Groot

Every serious dashboard has them: icons. They are small, but they do a lot on a dashboard. Good icons let users recognize elements on a dashboard – filter panels, info buttons, navigation – without having to read a single word.

Bad ones make a dashboard feel unfinished and uncomfortable, even when you don’t exactly know why.

This article is not a comparison list of icon sets – you can find these already. It’s guidance on how to use icons for dashboards: pick a general set, know when to look further, and when to draw your own.

Live News in Tableau – setup in 10 minutes

2026-09-22 by Johan de Groot

Dashboards are usually great at showing trends, but it is always good to now why these trends are happening. News articles, press releases, blog posts can be a good addition to your daily data input.

In this tutorial, we’ll close that gap by building a lightweight news feed that lives right inside a Tableau dashboard. A Python script does the scraping and processing, GitHub runs it and hosts the resulting data for free, and the Tableau REST Connector pulls it straight into your workbook: no server maintenance, no paid API, and no manual work.

Stop using red vs green in dashboards

2026-09-15 by Johan de Groot

So many dashboards show “good vs bad”, or “above vs below target” in a chart or text with green and red. Red means stop, green means go in traffic – so it feels universal. It isn’t.

Normal

Protanopia — Normal

A meaningful part of your users find it really hard to tell apart red and green, which makes this the one of the most common accessibility mistakes in dashboard design.

Tableau Toggle Button: 3 Ways to Build an On/Off Switch

2026-08-29 by Johan de Groot

A true/false parameter in Tableau gives you three ways to show it: a dropdown, radio buttons, or a slider. None of them looks like the on/off toggle you know from every app on your phone.

Three methods - Shapes, Image Roles and Extension - all leading to the same on/off toggle

Tableau has no native toggle, but three workarounds will get you one: shapes, image roles, and a dashboard extension. In this post I look at all three, and at the pros and cons of each, so you can pick the right one.

The Tally extension: CountTo renewed

2026-07-08 by Johan de Groot

A while back I introduced a little Tableau extension I built called CountTo – a number that animates up (and down) to your KPI instead of just sitting there. It started as a client request for a sustainability dashboard, turned into a fun JavaScript challenge, and ended up being one of the more popular things I’ve put out for free.

I have revamped it – new name, same idea, a lot more polish. It is now called Tally.

5 more Tableau Desktop Tips: Fields, Calculations & Pills

2026-07-01 by Johan de Groot

After year in Tableau Desktop, I sometimes forget the minor features that make the program so powerful. They’re the small moves: searching data fields, creating calculations on the fly, editing pills – that you do dozens of times a day without thinking.

Half of these tips I only realized were worth writing down because someone stopped me mid-explanation while I was teaching and asked “Wait. How did you just do that?”

“How did you just do that?“

After the first round went down well, here are five more, this time all centered on fields, calculations, and pills.

Missed the first batch? Start with the first five Tableau Desktop tips.

MeasureCamp Amsterdam 2026: the power of the blank board

2026-04-29 by Johan de Groot

On Saturday, April 18th, MeasureCamp Amsterdam took over House of Watt once again. No pre-defined agenda, no keynotes. Just a group of people who care about data, and a blank schedule board waiting to be filled. And that blank board is the center of one of the most powerful analytics events which I really love.

Datafam Day 2026 – Amsterdam

2026-04-22 by Johan de Groot

With Tableau Conference 2026 in just a few weeks, a special event was organized by Tableau at Tableau (Salesforce HQ Amsterdam): Datafam Day.

Not to be confused by Datafam Europe (from last december), Datafam Day was an evening with very interesting sessions from Visionaries and Ambassadors about the latest and greatest developments from Tableau (earlier that week also in London).

How to create pill-style navigation in Tableau

2026-04-01 by Johan de Groot

Tableau dashboards often contain functional, but visually not really exciting navigation. Until recently, creating a modern menu meant floating objects, images, and/or tricky workarounds.

With the new rounded corners feature in Tableau 2026.1, you can now build cleaner, intuitive navigation bars that highlight the active item while keeping the others flat, just like the pill-style menus common on the web. In this post, I’ll show you how to set it up step by step and avoid the common pitfalls along the way.

Instead of the classic, rigid button layouts, you can now create modern navigation bars that feel much closer to what users expect from contemporary web and app design.

It’s a subtle change, but it makes dashboards feel more polished, more intentional, and ultimately more user-friendly.

Tableau Visionary 2026

2026-03-20 by Johan de Groot

I’m incredibly excited to share that I’ve been selected as a 2026 Tableau Visionary.

While the title is a huge personal milestone, the real momentum doesn’t come from the individual recognition – it’s the company I’m keeping. There is something incredibly humbling about being placed in the same league as this cohort.

Tableau REST API Connector: Add Live Web Data to Your Dashboards

2026-03-12 by Johan de Groot

With Tableau 2026.1, a major new feature has arrived. You can now bring fresh, live data from web services directly into your dashboards – no scripts, no intermediate databases, and no manual imports required.

Few steps from Connector to Dashboard

Whether you want to monitor the latest sales from your CRM, track website visits in near real-time, or display the current weather for operational planning, the REST API Connector makes it simple to integrate external data into Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud.

This feature is particularly useful for analysts who need near‑real‑time operational data (CRM updates, event logs, weather, IoT signals) without traditional ETL workflows.

Rounded Corner Maps in Tableau

2026-03-05 by Johan de Groot

Version 2026.1 of Tableau is released with – among other features and improvements – Rounded Corners! A long awaited feature by many, with some doubts on the necessity by others…

According to the New Features list:

Set a corner radius for dashboard objects directly in Tableau Desktop and Web Authoring. Say goodbye to jumping through hoops with annotations or images. Just set the radius value to create a simple rounded corner or a more extreme corner radius to create different shapes.

Improving Radar Charts: Showing Overview and Details

2026-02-26 by Johan de Groot

In previous posts, I explored when to use radar charts and how to build them flexible and modular in Tableau. But as we’ve seen, this format has a notorious ‘blind spot.’ While it works well for showing a recognizable shape, the granular details often get drowned out in the overall picture.

Now we are taking the next step: improving the legibility of the radar chart by zooming in on individual spoke values without losing the context of the whole.

Create a Radarchart in Tableau – Modular and Simple

2026-02-11 by Johan de Groot

In an earlier post, Radar Charts: Practical tips for when and how to use them, I explored when radar charts work well, when they don’t, and the common pitfalls that make them misleading or hard to read. This article builds on that foundation.

Instead of revisiting the theory, I’ll focus on how to construct a radar chart in Tableau in a different way than usual. The new way is is more modular, provides more options, and might be easier.

Radar Charts: Practical tips for when and how to use them

2026-01-25 by Johan de Groot

Radar charts (also known as spider charts, web charts, or even Kiviat diagrams) are among the most recognizable – and controversial – chart types in data visualization.

They promise a compact way to compare multiple metrics at once, which is why they often show up in dashboards, even when they create more confusion than clarity.

This article explains

What a radar chart actually encodes
Where radar charts can be effective
Why they often fail in analytical contexts
Practical guidance for using them responsibly

The goal is not to ban radar charts, but to use them deliberately and with clear awareness of their trade-offs.