The amazing Rody Zakovich and I presented at the Tableau Conference last year in Las Vegas. It was a great session and we were pleased with the big turnout. Our session was on how to create custom charts in Tableau. Really our session was about how to create anything in Tableau by following three basic steps:
- Plot Points Everything is a scatter plot
- Connect Points Use the marks shelf (color, path, etc)
- Format Points Add context and style
You can watch our presentation here. If you want to reverse engineer what Rody and I did we have posted our workbooks to Tableau public (Adam's slides). These workbooks have step by step walk-thrus of how every chart we demoed was created in Tableau.
We both walked through several examples. Rody explained how to create new, complex chart types like Area Bump Charts and Spiral Node Link Charts. While my session focused on how to create custom visualizations like this Game of Thrones viz and the above Presidential Election viz.
I was talking recently to Steve Wexler about the spectrum of data visualization; from data art to infographic to dashboard. This topic has always interested me. So I wanted to challenge myself to create 3 data visualizations in Tableau for each medium type using the same data set. See the final product below. Use the slider to change through each viz type.
Every visualization uses the same data on tropical storms and is the same size. For the most part I used the same fields and color palette as well. This ensures the driving difference in the visualization is the medium not the data or size. The final products vary greatly obviously. See a comparison of the 3 mediums below as well when and why to use each approach.
Three years ago I made a Thanksgiving schedule to help my family and I prepare Thanksgiving dinner. This new version is built for our mobile phones. The data is hosted in Google sheets. You can easily replicate for yourself by downloading the workbook, connect to your own updated file (mimic my structure to make in pain-free), and publish to Tableau Public. Have a great Thanksgiving everyone.
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