Steve’s Blog

Accurate vs. Emotional Comparisons – Sometimes Pies, Bubbles, and Waffles are the Better Choice

By |2020-02-25T15:29:54+00:00September 15th, 2015|Business Visualizations, General Discussions|

Overview Figure 1 – Bar charts are better than pie charts are better than donut charts.  Most of the time. As anyone who has read this blog knows I’m definitely a “bar charts are better than pie charts are better than donut charts” kind of guy, at least when you need to [...]

In Praise of Treemaps

By |2015-09-01T06:41:23+00:00September 1st, 2015|Business Visualizations, General Discussions|

Overview I’ll admit that I have a problem with treemaps in Tableau, but it's not because the chart type is in some way inferior. My problem is with how people use - and misuse - treemaps. Here’s a good example of misuse.  Instead of displaying something straightforward that looks like this… Figure 1 -- The humble, [...]

Showing “Now” versus “Then”

By |2015-06-04T11:46:19+00:00June 4th, 2015|Business Visualizations, General Discussions, Visualizing Survey Data|

Showing Differences between Periods and Statistical Significance in Tableau Overview Addressing this scenario has been the most popular request I’ve received over the past year. Here’s a summary what my clients and students have asked: How do I show the change in Sales, Percentage of Promoters, Number of Visits, etc., between this month / quarter [...]

Reshaping Survey Data with Tableau 9.0

By |2015-03-30T12:52:27+00:00March 30th, 2015|Visualizing Survey Data|

Overview Tableau 9.0 includes a built-in data prepping tool that makes reshaping survey data so it plays nicely with Tableau a much smoother experience than using the Tableau Excel add-in.  While this new feature won’t replace by trusty copy of Alteryx (for reasons that I explain later in this post) there are many occasions where [...]

It’s Your Data, Not the Viz, That’s Boring

By |2025-01-12T20:29:31+00:00March 11th, 2015|General Discussions, Makeovers, Visualizing Survey Data|

Overview Note: I based my Tableau Conference 2015 presentation on this blog post. You can download a PDF of the presentation and the Tableau packaged workbook.  Click here to see a video of the presentation. Earlier this year one of my clients was updating a collection of survey data dashboards and they wanted to revisit the [...]