At Unilytics, we’re all about creating visualizations that deliver better insights. But creating meaningful visual dashboards is often really difficult. It’s generally much more challenging than clients think. That’s mostly because it’s not always easy to access corporate data and make sense of it. Disconnected customer and product information is often stored in a multitude […]
Calculating Measures in Prior Years Tableau makes many things significantly easier, but not everything. One very common challenge Tableau designers wade through is computing prior period values. For example, sales data for prior periods that align with the current year to date (YTD). To further illustrate the example, if the current YTD is only 128 […]
Welcome back to our Unilytics Tableau Master Challenge, the second in this series. If you didn’t see the Tableau Master Challenge #2 blog post, you can see it here with details of the challenge and what you have to accomplish to succeed. What seemed easy at first was the fact that we know how to configure […]
From Padawan Learner to Tableau Jedi Creating Tableau dashboards can seem easy at first, but the more you learn the more you appreciate that with so many options and choices, there are many complex decisions to be made. And very specific skills are required to go beyond simple visualizations. This article summarizes the top four […]
This is the second in a series of challenges for those that believe they have what it takes to be a Tableau Jedi. The series will call on your understanding of the intricacies of Tableau functionality and their usage. Let’s jump right into it. Say we’re working in Tableau Desktop, we put together a nice […]
I have been closely following and writing about trends in the business intelligence market over the past three years. During this time, I can’t say that I’ve seen any “radically new” trends, and I don’t expect any to emerge in 2017. What I have seen, and anticipate for 2017, is the “evolution” of the dominant […]
Little has changed in the collection of financial data, and reporting on it is just as complicated as ever. We hear this from clients all the time. I am constantly frustrated with the reporting obtained from our own accounting and finance system. It lacks useful reports, and I am never (rarely) able to get answers […]
We are often asked to help clients establish a culture of analytics and an environment of better business intelligence (BI). But that request often comes from companies already using traditional, long-term suppliers of BI solutions. So, we wanted to understand why firms using a “so called” leading BI tool would still be looking for a […]
The Challenge A common request when analyzing large amounts of data is to evaluate the impact exceptional data has on results. Statistics addresses these needs by offering “median” and “average” when normalizing large numbers of data points. Median selects a data point in the exact center of all data points to define the “normal” value […]
Client dashboards are rarely ever “done” and evolve over time from one version to the next. When dashboard functionality or information changes, the descriptive contents of the dashboard have to be manually updated. Also, Tableau dashboards often link to other dashboards, and when they are moved between Tableau sites or Tableau Servers, the links need […]
