When I was a young kid my uncle had a stroke. A middle aged man with a wife and three daughters, it changed his life completely. Not so long after his stroke my uncle came to live with us, becoming part of our family unit for the final 30ish years of his life. Uncle Jack […]
Learning new things is hard.
I get it. You already know Excel. Tableau is just plain confusing (and annoying, and expensive). I’ve been there. But Tableau can do things that Excel cannot. Like directly weave a bunch of different data sources, living in different databases and on different servers, into the same dashboard. All with automated updates. Or creating a […]
A dashboard you can’t update.
My preferred way to create a dashboard is to start with something simple, crude even. Then over time, adapt. The faster the dashboard goes live, the better. This is the way most web software is built. Always in beta, changes are then made based on the needs of the users. Many organizations put in most […]
Can you influence your dashboard?
A lot of organizations get tied up with the whole “car dashboard look.” That’s all surface area stuff. Real dashboards give us access to information we can use to make decisions. Our actions should also be able to influence the data. Fuel gauges and speedometers give us data we can influence through our actions. Do […]
A Tableau Revisit
Back during my Westat days, I was always a little surprised by how few Tableau licenses found their way into employee’s hands. We had a lot a data and the kinds of projects that could clearly afford to foot the bill for a license or two. But there were a couple of things that really […]