My highlights from Tableau Conference 2021

Hey there!
Hope you’re doing well and thank you for visiting my blog, I can start off by explaining why I haven’t published on this blog since 2018 but let’s not get into that? TL:DR I’ve spent more time with the WeVisualize community and also at my day job!

#TC21 ended a few days ago and left me really inspired and fired up and this might be an attempt to revive this blog so let’s see how it goes. Here are the interesting products and features from the conference that I’m looking forward to and why:

No better place to start than the opening keynote! Let’s kick it off with

Tableau for Slack: With our current realities of remote work, I use Slack daily at work and this helps with asynchronous collaboration, connecting and getting things done.

Slack is a big part of my workflow so being able to get notifications for data-driven alerts in a group channel, chat with my colleagues to explore solutions based on what the data is telling us and decide next steps without opening a different browser and remain in the flow is a big win. (+ I’m super pleased to discard our previous painful Slack + Zapier + Gmail workaround to get alerts in Slack)

Also, I can now search for data or a dashboard from our Tableau site right from Slack? *chef’s kiss*

That’s not all, coming in a future release is Explain Data that helps you understand the why behind your data and

Ask Data – Type a question, get visual answers..all in Slack!

And because Einstein discovery is in your data prep flow, there’s added functionality to access predictive insights with Ask Data

Next is Business Science (Data Science folks are going to love this one) – Model Builder is going to make it easier for anyone to access machine learning for predictive analytics all in Tableau! You’re going to want to watch the keynote to see this live in action!

Meta(Data) Management – Aside from row-level security, Tableau is providing the functionality to bring in external metadata into Tableau so it fits into your data stack. If you’ve had to maintain field descriptions in multiple enterprise data catalogs or maybe even Google sheets you are going to be excited for this one.

Hire Me on Tableau Public – The community is a big part of Tableau and a lot of people have leveraged their Tableau Public portfolios as part of their learning journey and also even while looking for opportunities. Now you can continue to build your portfolio, share your work and your next employer might just click on the Hire Me tag on your profile! How to enable this on your profile? Login to Tableau Public, Edit Profile, Enable the Hire me button and voila!

Accelerators: These are ready to use dashboards (an extension of starter dashboards) leveraging best practices that will require you to only plug in your raw data and then you have a dashboard that’s ready to help you gain insights for your business. Talk about plug and play. Salesforce acquired Lintao (they’ve been operating since 2016 and provided these plug and play dashboard templates) in Sep 2021 so it makes sense that this is happening.

Now let’s see what’s exciting from Devs on Stage – Tableau developers came through with a bang!…you’ve probably seen some dashboards on Tableau Public or on Twitter that had you wondering how did they do that and what hacks you need to learn to do same? Viz Extensions is here for you! Now you get to spend less time reverse engineering a dashboard you love from Tableau Public with more native visualization types available for you

There’s more:

• Dynamic dashboard layout
• Improved flexibility with view data
• Workbook optimizer (if you’ve struggled with performance for your dashboards, you’ll appreciate the performance checks this gives you)
• Data Change Radar
• Digging deeper into Explain Data + Ask Data (really rad you need to see the demo live!)
  • Explain Data Side Pane
  • Explain the Viz
  • Share Ask Data to Slack

• Virtual connections – to centrally manage access to groups of tables (think of it as security and governance on steroids) and makes it easier to manage schema changes!
• Tableau Public Slack integration
• Full web authoring and editing in Tableau Public
• Discover in Tableau Public – personalized recommendations, fresh coat of paint on profile page, curated topics and custom channels

Now before this gets into highlights from the keynotes and DevsonStage only..I’ll be sharing some of the sessions that I’ve enjoyed so far (you’ll see why I wasn’t able to catch sessions live during conference if you keep reading 🙂

• Shhh… Tableau Secrets from the Experts – (It’s a secret so you have to watch it to learn it haha)
• Make It Better: Tips for Better Dashboard Design – You already know The Flerlages are a masterclass in dashboard design, so you don’t want to miss this!
• Tableau Speed Tips: Shortcuts and Tricks for All Skill Levels – At the end of this session, you’ll surely feel like you’ve been gifted a magic wand to make you more efficient building in Tableau!
• Minimalist Designs for Maximum Communication – Chimdi published his first viz on Tableau Public just about a year ago and his vizzes are heavy on the minimalist side with impeccable design, check out his Public profile here
• Tableau Zen Masters Share Their Best Advice – (I promise it’s not because I’m a part of the group but there’s really valuable tips in here!)
• From Soup to Nuts: How Data is Turned into Insight – This was one session I related deeply with as the panelists shared actionable tactics on building a data culture and engaging the business and getting buy in when scaling data across the organisation.

These were over 300 sessions so this is only a tiny fraction that I’m sharing here, I want to encourage you to check out the event video library as all the sessions have been uploaded on-demand, thank you Tableau!

Tableau also announced a pledge to train 10 million data learners over the next five years, the company will do this through different initiatives, I’m particularly excited at the expansion of the Tableau Academic Program as I have something cooking with the academic team and some community members launching early next year!

I also can’t end this without talking about my experience as a Tableau Doctor for the second year running, I got to interact with conference attendees who had pre-booked a session and helped them solve technical issues and also share best practices on dashboard design and tips. So grateful to get this opportunity as a Tableau Zen Master and shout out to the working team for helping with all the logistics and ensuring everything went smoothly!

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  Day 1

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  Day 2

Sarah has also put up her very detailed recap of conference, so you should check out her blog here

A big thank you to Tableau for putting this together, I can’t imagine the effort that went into producing such a high-quality event.

Looking forward to doing this again next year and hopefully in person too!

Cheers.

MakeoverMonday Week 26 – London Cycle Hire Usage

We’re halfway through the year for MakeoverMonday!

I can’t believe I’ve come this far (week after week). I’ll have to put up another post on what I’ve learned embarking on this journey but I’m glad I did.

I really like the original viz and I’ll leave it as is. What stories or patterns can you tell from the original viz? Hint: Click the image below for an interactive version.

I’ve been wanting to build an infographic type viz for a while and this large dataset presented the perfect opportunity!

*Click image for interactive version*

It’s been very fulfilling completing half a year of MakeoverMondayzz, but my schedule is about to switch up and I do not think I’d be able to continue for the rest of the year.

Let’s see how it goes!

Thanks for reading.

MakeoverMonday Week 25 – Influenza Surveillance Report

Data, Data, Data.

Not to preach to the choir or anything but having the right data really is key to effective decision making and I can only imagine what a better country Nigeria would be if we were deliberate on gathering data and obtaining insights. Case in point, this week’s MM. Andy noticed a lot of headlines surrounding a flu outbreak this year, so he did some googling and found this dataset.

The percentage of visits for influenza-like illness has been at an all-time high despite being only 36 weeks into the year and is the worst flu recorded since 2009/2010. This discovery can serve as a good starting point to discover what has changed and led to these results. #Datahastheanswers

My thoughts on the original viz below:

• It’s a good use case for a line chart as it’s easy to spot trends
• The use of multiple colors result in a clutter of some sort, maybe highlight just two years or use lighter colors for other seasons.
• I am not sure the purpose of the baseline as indicated here.

This week, I learned how to encode arrows in my viz to show up and down changes in trends.

*Click image below for interactive version*

For people in the States any thoughts on this flu outbreak? Do share.

Afterthoughts: I think coding the arrows in different colors (say black and white) would be more helpful.

 

 

MakeoverMonday Week 24 – Tourism Density Index

I’m a travel enthusiast and sometimes I spend my time fawning over locations on Instagram and plotting my next adrenaline activity on my next trip out, then I snap back to real life cos guess what? I ain’t living that lavish life yet with unending leave days and deep pockets to travel wherever I would want to.

Overtourism and Undertourism is a new term I discovered on this week’s MakeoverMonday and it has been interesting learning about these different countries and their approach to tourism. I did some additional research and found that Singapore is the most welcoming city in the world. *Bumps it up my list*

My thoughts on this week’s Viz:

• Yes to properly defined terms and title
• I like the colors used and I tried to retain that in my own viz
• The charts are labeled in detail, however, comparing the numbers would take some extra effort as it does not stand out.
• The circles are all the same size, which might come across as all the countries having the same number of locals.

While exploring the dataset, I discovered Singapore’s story and chose to share that. In addition to bumping Singapore up my travel list, Lee Kuan Yew’s book is now on my reading list.

*Click image for interactive version*

Any of these countries on your travel list? do share!

MakeoverMonday Week 23 – UK Gender Pay Gap

The dataset this week was quite difficult to get through, but this is such an important topic so I made sure to wiggle around it. Another win this week was me finally getting around to explore Tableau Prep, thanks to Andys tutorial.

My thoughts on the Viz above:

• I liked the use of icons to differentiate between the genders
• The header works well and the number is visible enough. However, I am not sure what the number represents. It does not exactly tell who earns more, I know I know Captain Obvious, but it may be rather presumptuous of us to immediately assume the men earned more if a reader did not bother to view the accompanying article.
• The filled up colors for both genders are at the same level and that does not exactly show any difference. You agree?

What I did:

• I decided to visualize the differences in the pay gap between company sizes and went ahead to recreate Danifornication’s viz.

*Click image for interactive version*

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Below is something interesting I read in the main article

The gender pay gap shows the difference in the average pay between all men and women in a workforce.

The gender pay gap is different to equal pay. Equal pay deals with the pay differences between men and women who carry out the same jobs, similar jobs or work of equal value. It is unlawful to pay people unequally because they are a man or a woman.

If you’re interested in reading the full article, link here.