Seemingly every week, there’s a story of an epic failure of a well-intentioned IT project. The company, or government, or charity set out to make changes and incorporate modern technology. They ended up wasting gobs of money and having nothing to show for it. Some stories can be truly mind-boggling, like the US Veterans Administration […]
For years, most of us have been using Excel for data analysis and are now ready to take advantage of the live visual analytics offered by Tableau. Tableau is well worth learning whether it’s for the ability to explore data and get insights quickly, for its automation functionality, for its sharing and collaboration capability, or […]
Recently while working with a client, I came across a challenging scenario: how do you filter the view, using a date filter, without impacting a calculation which included data that didn’t meet the date filter. In this case it was a moving average calculation (i.e., mean of specified time series). This is a tricky situation […]
We know a thing or two about analytics! Unilytics has been in analytics consulting since 2001 and started out in web analytics. We turned our attention to business intelligence and building dashboards five years ago and see many parallels. Website designers are always trying to enhance site usage, encourage more engagement, and improve the user […]
Many Tableau users are familiar with measure swapping, an approach to allow increased dashboard flexibility. Users can select metrics as if they were dimensions of the data, when the metrics are in fact columns in a data source. This is achieved with a combination of text parameters in a list, and calculated fields using the […]
Last month, Tableau announced another major release, version 10.4. While there are several exciting new features relating to accessibility, dashboard design and Denodo, I’d like to highlight a big step forward in Tableau’s mapping capabilities. Although Tableau is not a full-fledged Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tool, we use its mapping features constantly at Unilytics in […]
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 […]
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