Tableau Tea Break #5 - 31st December 2020
Tableau Tea Break #5 - 31st December 2020
In the last Tableau Tea Break of 2020 we reflect on what's happened this year, share what we're looking forward to in 2021 and bring you our latest top Tableau blog posts
This week we’re back with the final Tableau Tea Break of the year! In our last post we took a break from our usual newsletter and shared our Introducing Tableau Ambassadors - Find & Connect viz. It shows how quickly this year has gone that it’s a month since our last proper Tableau Tea Break!
Before we get into this weeks issue I’ve got some exciting ideas for how I’d like to develop Tableau Tea Break next year, it would be great to hear what you think if you could take a couple of minutes to complete our very quick survey:
Tableau Tea Break
Tableau Tea Break started out as an internal newsletter at work where I shared useful information and links to articles, webinars, trainings and events that I thought would be useful as part of our roll out of Tableau.
While doing this I found a lot of blogs were no longer active and there wasn’t really a good list of the latest active blogs so I started to publish a list of active blogs each month along with some featured posts that I’d found particularly useful or interesting.
I didn’t really plan to publish this externally but when I started publishing the newsletter on Substack interest started to grow so I started looking at other things to include and expand on, here’s a quick overview of how it’s grown since starting:
For 2021 I’m planning to start adding some more original content, as well as continuing to share links that I’ve found useful.
Some of the ideas currently include:
Sharing real life projects to give an insight into how Tableau is used within organisations.
Sharing insights into our own journey of implementing Tableau Server and rolling Tableau out as our strategic Business Intelligence tool.
Looking at interesting uses of Tableau, particularly with other tools, integrations and APIs.
Sharing highlights from Tableau User Groups and webinars.
Looking at some of our favourite uses of Tableau, and perhaps trying to recreate them.
Alongside that I’m looking to launch the Tableau Academy where we share weekly tutorials by email and provide access to a community to help people build their Tableau skills, find people to learn with and build their portfolio of work:
I’d be really interested to see what you think of this and whether you’d find this useful. There’s a couple of questions on it in the Tableau Tea Break Survey mentioned above and we’ll be looking to launch this early next year.
2020 Review
With 2020 quickly coming to an end I thought I’d share some highlights of the past year working with Tableau.
New Year, New Job
2020 started out quite strange but still didn’t prepare us for what it was really going to be like! I’d finished a contract at the end of 2019 and was looking for a new job, I’d been offered a role helping roll Tableau out just as coronavirus and the lock down it here in the UK. Luckily the role still went ahead working from home since April which has had it’s challenges but I’ve learned a lot, had opportunities to get more involved in the Tableau community and made a lot of progress on setting up our own Tableau Centre of Excellence and getting ready to deploy Tableau Server across the organisation.
Learning Tableau Server
This year I’ve learnt a lot about Tableau Server! I thought I already knew a bit about but going through a greenfield deployment has meant I’ve had to learn quickly and realised just how little I knew about the technical architecture side. It’s been good to learn this and I had the opportunity to attend the Tableau Server Architecture course last month wish also showed me how complicated our implementation is!
Top Tableau Blog posts Viz
This was something I put together for my own use as a way to be able to keep up with Tableau blog posts as I find this one of the best way to discover new things and ideas. I published it to Tableau Public and has had quite a number of views, I’m now updating this each week with new blog posts.
I’ve recently added a search function and I may develop this further to help people discover new blogs and preview posts directly in Tableau Public.
Gender diversity on the NYSE viz
This was a piece of work I did for the Tableau Battle of the Banks in December, it was quite last minute so I was pretty proud of what I managed to come up with and there was also some pretty interesting findings about the impact gender diverse leadership seems to have on organisations.
Gender diversity is something our industry needs to work on and it’s good to see this being acknowledged and interested to see the outcome from this initiative next year.
Tableau Ambassadors - Find & Connect
It’s always surprised me that Tableau don’t provide a searchable database of the Tableau Ambassadors so I decided to make one! It lets you search and filter to find relevant Tableau Ambassadors and then allows you to see their Tableau Public profile and links out to their social media and personal blog/website.
This is a piece of work I’m particularly proud of as there was a lot to figure out with it! I’ve not really promoted it much yet but plan to share it with some of the featured ambassadors to get some feedback early next year.
Looking forward to 2021
I’m not usually one for making big plans as I tend to get bored and distracted easily and end up doing something other than I’d planned! Here’s 10 things I’m looking forward to in 2021, both professionally and personally:
1. Growing Tableau Tea Break: I’d like to get into the habit of publishing this weekly from next year, I’ve got some ideas that I’d like to try out but I’m sure they’ll evolve. Ultimately I’d like it to become a useful digest for the Tableau Community of what’s going on.
2. Becoming more involved with the Tableau community + collaborating with others: As well as growing Tableau Tea Break I’d like to get more involved with Tableau initiatives and user groups in 2021, it’d also be great to start collaborating with others or having other people contribute to Tableau Tea Break (drop me a message if you’re interested!)
3. Launching Tableau Academy: More on this coming very soon but I’m working on a plan to launch a paid community that provides regular training and tutorials to help people level up their Tableau skills. I’ve also got ideas to look at providing Tableau learning buddies and access to voluntary and paid opportunities to use your skills.
4. Rolling out Tableau further at work: We’ve just begun our journey of deploying Tableau Server and moving from sporadic use of Tableau Desktop, 2021 should be very challenging as we roll Tableau out further across the company but I’m looking forward to it.
5. Finding/establishing group for Tableau Centre of Excellence owners: I’m not sure if this already exists but I’ll be looking for opportunities to share learning with and from other people who run a Tableau CoE at their organisation.
Alongside those I’d thought it ‘d be interesting to share more about what I like to do outside of work so here are 5 things I’m looking forward to aside from work:
6. Viz your future: This may be a bit ambitious but I’d like to set up something similar to code your future for data analysis/visualisation. The idea is to provide free training for people from disadvantaged backgrounds to help them build a career and find a job in data visualisation or analysis.
7. Football (soccer) coaching & improving: I started coaching junior football about 18 months ago and is something I really enjoy and find really rewarding, the kids definitely keep me on my toes and I’m looking forward to continuing to learn and improve my coaching skills!
8. Setting up a community football fitness sessions: Something the corona virus lock down has really highlighted is the need for people to be able to come together and look after both their physical and mental health. I’d love to set up fun football fitness sessions within my local community for anyone to join, basically running the kids sessions but for adults as it’s a lot of fun!
9. Getting back into running & climbing: I’m not getting any younger and have found with working from home and all the restrictions this year I’ve got less active. I’d really like to get back into running and climbing this year both and to lose a few pounds. Hopefully when things get more back to normal I can do a couple more 10k runs as well.
10. Doing more volunteering: I’ve been really lucky the last few years to have the opportunity to do quite a bit of volunteering at places I enjoy, highlights included a volunteering day at work at the local animal rescue centre, a garden makeover to make it wheelchair friendly and chopping trees and shrubs down at the National Trust! Obviously opportunities to do these in 2020 were limited so I’m looking forward to hopefully getting back in 2021!
Last 2020 blog update
December’s been a pretty busy month and I’ve been taking some time away since Christmas so haven’t been keeping up with Tableau as much as normal and have only just updated the Top Tableau Blog posts viz. (We’ve no got 256 posts on there since we started in September this year!)
Here are some of the posts that we found most useful:
Find out how to create Multi Dimension Bar Charts (like those below)
Andrew Lang | Biztory | 29 Dec ‘20
Looking back at this years Viz of The Day in Tableau’s 2020 VizInReview
Tableau Public | Tableau Blog | 24 Dec ‘20
Marc Reid shows us five ways to use images in Tableau on the data vis blog
Marc Reid | Datavis | 24 Dec ‘20
I couldn’t help but include this weeks makeover Monday looking at Arsenal's worst start to a season. This is particularly pleasing for any Manchester United fans that remembers the fierce rivalry from the late 90’s/early 00’s!
Eva Murray | Tri My Data | 23 Dec ‘20
12 Tableau tips before the 12 days of Christmas? Yes please!
Jeffrey A. Shaffer | Data + Science | 22 Dec ‘20
Eric Parker takes a look at how to create line charts with different shapes (dashes, dots etc), something that’s actually quite tricky to do well in Tableau!
Eric Parker | OneNumber | 16 Dec ‘20
Alexander Varlamov brings us a guest post on animated pooygons in Tableau on The Flerlage Twins blog.
Alexander Varlamov | The Flerlage Twins | 7 Dec ‘20
Tableau News
In case you missed it Tableau 2020.4 was released this month with some really useful updates, read more and download it below or watch the release video:
Nominations for Tableau Zen Masters 2021 opened in December, you’ve got until 8th January 2021 to get your nominations in:
And finally don’t forget to check out the latest best of Tableau web:
Well that’s it for another year, all that’s left is to wish a very strange 2020 goodbye and hope for some kind of return to normality in 2021!
Hope you all have a safe and enjoyable start to the New Year and we’ll be back in early January.
Alan @ Tableau Tea Break
P.S Don’t forget to tell us what you think in the Tableau Tea Break Survey!
I'm interested in seeing if your "real-life projects" gets much engagement. Social media tends to have little interest in the useful (but often mundane) real MI world, and is far more excited by jazzy infographics that would have little use in the corporate world.