Blog

Deep Cleaning Barcharts – part 1: the basics

2025-01-16 by Johan de Groot

[part of the ‘Datafam London 2024 series]

On DataFam 2024 in London I gave a presentation / workshop on deep cleaning dashboards.

Why cleaning dashboards?

Make it look better ▶ Users want to use it
Less clutter on your dashboard ▶ Less clutter in your brain
Making your dashboard more actionable ▶ Focusing on what’s important.

Dashboard cleaning is about: Removing, adding , re-arranging, and replacing stuff. In Tableau, it’s about: Table calculations, extra sheets, changing images, talking to users, being critical to yourself, … Is hard work – and a lot of fun!

[Read more…]

Top 2000 – Edition 2024: Snow Globes

2024-12-29 by Johan de Groot

It’s my personal yearly end-of-December Christmas tradition: visualizing the Top 2000 hitlist of NPO Radio 2 (a Dutch national radio station).

(you can also view the interactive visualization on Tableau Public)

[Read more…]

Christmas Movie Marathon using a Image based bar-chart

2024-12-16 by Johan de Groot

You can use to create your own Christmas Movie Marathon in Tableau using this dashboard!
Based on the IMDB dataset ‘100 best Christmas movies of all time’ and some nice Tableau techniques you can determine which movies you want to watch this holiday.

Start by entering the time you can spend on movies this holiday on Step 1 (from a couple of hours to several days), and then use step 2 to select all the movies you want to see during this time.
Selections can be made on plot, but also runtime, genre and/or IMDB rating.

[Read more…]

Tableau ‘CountTo’ Extension

2024-12-11 by Johan de Groot

Ever wanted to count up or down in Tableau?
Now you can using the CountTo Viz Extension – for free!

Count up and down inside Tableau

Using this extension a dashboard will count up or down to a certain value.

[Read more…]

DataFam 2024 – London

2024-12-02 by Johan de Groot

On the 11th and 12th of November of this year a complete new Tableau event was held in the center of London: DataFam 2024.

Tableau Datafam 2024 London

[Read more…]

Change all colors at once

2024-07-26 by Johan de Groot

One of the most impactful development tips I got during TC24 was a very small one, but I have used it a lot since then.

What is you have just finished your dashboard, and your manager/client/voice in you head tells you: I think the color of the charts need to be changed to pink…

[Read more…]

Let there be Drama! Genres of Oscar winners

2024-07-03 by Johan de Groot

Using the great dataset ‘Data and Movies‘.- with lots of IMDB data from movies until 2022 – I created a dashboard about the different Genres of Academy Award Winners for Best Picture.

[Read more…]

Tableau Hyper API now on Apple Silicon

2024-06-23 by Johan de Groot

The June 2024 release of the Hyper API (version 0.0.19484) is available – and it now finally supports Apple Silicon!

[Read more…]

A better date-filter in Tableau

2024-06-13 by Johan de Groot

When building a dashboard, one of the most common elements is a date-filter. And the most used date filter is probably the infamous ‘Range of Dates’.

[Read more…]

Weather Forecast dashboard in Tableau

2024-04-03 by Johan de Groot

It’s just a couple of weeks before TC24 in San Diego… So we want to know what the weather is out there!

Or at home. Or any other place in the world.
What better than building your own weather forecast in Tableau!?

[Read more…]

Custom Tableau Shapes on maps – beware!

2024-01-28 by Johan de Groot

The ‘shapes’ functionality in Tableau is a nice way to enhance and personalize a visualization. But be aware what exactly you are decoration – especially on maps.

[Read more…]

Top 2000 of 2023 – what stood out?

2023-12-31 by Johan de Groot

The Top 2000 of Radio 2 (a populair Dutch radio station) has been broadcast for the 25th time – and traditionally I am trying to turn this into a ‘different’ interactive data visualization…

[Read more…]

Top 2000 van 2023 – wat viel er op in de lijst?

2023-12-31 by Johan de Groot

De 25e keer is de Top 2000 van Radio 2 uitgezonden – en traditiegetrouw probeer ik hier weer een ‘andere’ interactieve datavisualisatie van te maken…

[Read more…]

How to visualize extreme values?

2023-12-03 by Johan de Groot

Now and then you encounter data with ‘extreme values’. Values which are much larger than the other ones – and so hard to analyse.

A dataset which is skewed like that needs to have a special treatment when visualized, because otherwise the individual values can’t be identified correctly.

[Read more…]

Improve layout of percentags – Better labels in Tableau

2023-11-21 by Johan de Groot

Often improving a dashboard is about small changes. Have a look a this chart:

[This blogpost is part of a series tips tricks, as being presented at VizIt Berlin 2023]

[Read more…]