Passion Merging

A personal retrospect of super hobbies

Like many people, I have lots of what I would consider hobbies. Such as listening to music and podcasts, watching product reviews (aka unboxing) on YouTube to name a just a few. Lately, I have been finding myself putting these together to enhance my life. Originally, this was not done with any special purpose, it just happened. For Example, I became a runner this year, I Know, what did you go and do that for. If you are not a runner (like I wasn’t) it seems silly to exert so much energy just to end up back where you started, you don’t win anything running by yourself. I did find a real cause for my running other than the obvious reasons. I also like tech toys, like smart watches and headphones. So, I run with a smartwatch listening to music and track the miles with MapMyRun. I soon realized that I had lots of data to play with to learn more about my workouts to see if I was getting better. I used my visualization tools to create dashboards with Tableau Desktop. I can see how I am doing and get to practice techniques on my own project. I have shared this viz on public.tableau.com. Check it out and leave a comment if you wish.

I also started to teach myself to draw/sketch. I realized that knowing how to draw is quite helpful when designing UI for my dashboard work. Its also fun to shop and buy supplies, there are so many types of pencils and sketchbooks out there. I always had an affection for mechanical pencils, now I have three.

So the lesson here is to have fun and do fun things and you’re life will be rewarded.

Enjoy,
Scott

Interactive Reference Lines

Tableau Dashboards provide an incredibly powerful analytic platform. By using a few product features, you can add a very slick interface that displays dynamic text and a reference line on a dashboard. This type of setup works best for trend lines across serveral dimensions. In this example, I am plotting profit ratio across months by Category.

Using Superstore

• Place MONTH of Order Date to Columns
• Place Category and Profit Ratio to Rows
• Enable Text labels and set marks to label to /Highlight/ 
• From the Color card, choose the second mark type so users can see the label markers more easily
• Add a reference line to per pane
• Set the value to Month(Order Date) and aggregation to Minimum
• Set Label to None
• The most important setting is to check the box Show recalculated line for highlighted or selected data points

That takes care of the worksheet, now its time to setup a dashboard.

• Create a dashboard and add the worksheet we just created to it
• Next we need to add a dashboard action that will enable the dynamic display of the label text and reference line.
• Add a dashboard action, for Highlight
• Set the Run Action to Hover
• Change the Target Highlighting to Selected Fields and check the Month of Order Date.

That is all, easy right.

Now hover the mouse over and of the line to see the labels appear for each pane and have the reference line appear. This action only works on dashboards and will also display well when published to Tableau Server.

Highlight the first element in a bar chart using Tableau

Top N bar charts are quite common in Tableau. I have used this technique to jazz up a few of my latest vizzes for my clients. Often bar charts do not use color as each bar already represents a unique dimension. When creating Top N charts with the Tableau table calc Index(), you can highlight the top bar using a different color to help the user recognize the top element.

Follow these steps to recreate this view.

1. Connect to the Superstore data source.
2. Add Region and State to Rows
3. Add Sales to Columns
4. Apply a descending sort on State using Sum([Sales])
5. Add an Index() function on the rows as an in-place pill
6. Adjust the Compute Using to State
7. Drag copy Index() to Colors and Filter
8. Adjust filter to range of values, I used 1 to 5.
9. Now change the pill to Discrete
10. click Color and change the color of the first element to your color choice
11. Change elements 2 thru n to grey or some other neutral color.

Thanks for reading and feel free to reach out if you have any questions.


Twitter: scott_strool
Web: Vizardry.com (under Construction)

My Journey to becoming a Tableau Sales Consultant

My journey began a long long time in the winter of 2014. I was in the throws of a challenging data integration and dashboard development at a top telecommunications company. The tools at my disposal consisted of the entire BusinessObjects suite. At the time I had been an SAP BI consultant for 5 years. There had been some delays in getting the data ready for analytics so we did a lot of visual prototyping of the dashboards. We were to build three.

One day my manager called me, he rarely calls me and said we have a request from our client. They would like me to take a look at Tableau and tell them what we think about it. “Do this in your spare time and don’t charge them” I was told. I did some research and learned that I could download a trial so, that night I downloaded a a copy of Tableau Desktop and started my 14 day trial. 

Now some of these facts may be a little fuzzy, it was a long long time ago after all. I started by opening the sample workbooks and started clicking around. Things happened on the screen and it all looked pretty good, I had no idea what I was doing but I really like what I saw. I needed guidance.  I headed back to tableau.com and started looking for tutorials or videos. It did not take long for me to find the mother load of tutorials, all videos that showed me all I needed to know to become an advanced beginner with Tableau Desktop. I think I binged on all the beginner and intermediate videos, then I looked on YouTube for more. There was so much content I remember thinking that either this product is extremely popular or very difficult. It became the later for me in a couple of days. 

Tableau Desktop was not like any other tool I had seen before, drag-drop dashboards with little need to create difficult logic. It rendered beautiful visuals with ease and guided me with the help of Show Me and tooltips. I was getting hooked.

Near the end of the week I told my manager that I needed more time and I would like to have him purchase a license so I can continue my education. I sweetened the deal by explaining to him that I think we can use Tableau to analyze our sales pipeline. I received my license a couple of days later.

We offered our analysis to the client and they considered Tableau for the next project, they were already pretty well committed to use BOBJ.

Now it was time for me to build my own worksheets with our sales pipeline data. the data was easily exportable to Excel from Smartsheet so I was able to start building right away. As I built the sheets, I watched the advanced videos to learn more about what I can do with my new ‘data toy’. I was so impressed with the product and what I was able to develop that I was eager to share with the entire sales team. I requested a meeting to demonstrate Tableau and propose our new sales forecasting solution. I showed them the individual sheets and then brought it all together in a dashboard with filtering, drilling and several selectors. 

After about 20 minutes the VP of sales said, “Scott, this is great but I have one problem. You are a busy guy and I want this now”. 

I started to package the dashboard and send them out via email and that worked for a couple of weeks, but ultimately we needed a better way. I then transitioned my attention to understanding Tableau Server. This is what we needed but did not go anywhere after a short trial. The primary reason was time not functionality, we were all to busy to take on a tool for internal use only. 

For the next few months, I tweaked the dashboards but my Tableau days were coming to a close. In my mind, I knew we should embrace this product as it was the best tool I ever saw to create fast data visualizations.

Fast Forward 12 months (I continued as a Visual Analytics Consultant), I heard from a friend that works at Tableau and he asked me what I thought about coming over and joining a sales team. The idea intrigued me and I considered it for a few weeks. Then the moment happened, the time was right to pursue a new opportunity. We talked and he took my resume and pushed it up the chain. I was happy to hear that there was interest and I would be getting a call. The next few weeks were exciting with hesitation. Not only would I be leaving the tools that I had been using for many years, I would also be moving from post to pre-sales. 

I am going to gloss over the next few weeks as the details do not matter to the happy ending. I did the calls, interviews and sales demo presentation then the big day. “Hello, this is Scott”, “Hi Scott, we like you and would like to offer you a position with Tableau as a Sales Consultant”. I did not try to hide my excitement, I couldn’t. I said YES, I would like to start tomorrow! 

Now that I have started, I can now say, My name is Scott Strool, Tableau Sales Consultant. Our mission is to help people see and understand their data.  

July 2015

XWIS DecisionPoint Designer - A First Look

As a long time dashboard developer and visualization consultant I became interested in alternative solutions as SAP will be de-emphasizing Dashboard Designer (Xcelsius). At the 2013 SAP BusinessObjects Conference I was introduced to a dashboard development platform from Antivia, the 
makers of  XWIS, XWIS Advantage and XWIS Anywhere.

XWIS DecisionPoint Designer includes a user experience that is immediately familiar and also powerful. A palette of visual components are dropped onto a canvas to design any user interface that you want. By connecting to a DecisionPoint DataCenter you have access to a host of data sources. Once built, the dashboards can be shared to the web or a XWIS server for easy enterprise access.

The Designer Interface

The DecisionPoint designer is made up of a series of panels for building the dashboard and accessing the data sources. Everything is done via drag-n-drop. The panels include:

• Components
• Object Browser
• Data Browser
• Object Panel
• Context aware Properties

When first starting DecisionPoint, you are presented to connect to the server and choose a data source. The front end is a very polished interface and help is available while using the interface. Anybody that has used SAP Dashboard Designer will feel comfortable with the large list of components including all the charts and selectors,and data navigators.. Natively data aware components are also available in the Data Display folder. Included here is a Google Map for building location intelligent dashboards.  I especially like the tree interface in the component browser that is searchable by typing the first letter of the component you are looking for. The designer includes two modes; quick and advanced. Toggling between the two is easy but I would like to have a keyboard shortcut rather than just a toolbar and menu option.Quick mode is useful when working on the interface and not tweaking with the component properties or assigning data. Double clicking the canvas title will display just the canvas.

Designing without the sheet

DecisionPoint is different than Dashboard Designer in many ways, the most obvious is that Microsoft Excel is not used to define meta data and business rules. Logic is added to your dashboard as expressions in the properties of the component or at the data level in the object panel. The interface for entering logic is enhanced with syntax highlighting and code completion. For example, to define a toggle button action, you choose what to happen from a list when the toggle is on and when it is off. New data objects are also created using expressions. They even came up with a clever way to implement dynamic visibility that won’t make you talk to yourself. Using Views and Viewsets, (think Canvas), you place your components on them and enable when these are displayed. There is an option to make one of your Views as the Main view.

Putting on the Components

The list of visual controls is large and you should not have a problem finding the right component to visualize your data. Antivia is continually refining the product and could be adding new ones every few releases. You won’t find a radio button component in the release that I tested but a nice alternative is the Tab Bar which provides several styles that look very nice and may be easier to use on tablets.

Your components need to connect to data and with DecisionPoint it could not be any easier. By dragging a data source on top of the component it becomes linked and display the data live from the result objects. If you want to show different columns, just drop more the columns into data panel. The order of the columns sometimes matters especially when they are connected to a table.. Again this is quite easy and intuitive. As you set properties of the result object, the connected components are updated. You can change many aspects of the connected data columns including the Label, Format and the Aggregation Type to further define the functionality of the dashboard.

Aside from being able to see your data live during design is a nifty feature called LivePreview. You can view how your dashboard will look in a browser or mobile device while continuing to tweak things and the live view updates in real time. This could be a huge time saver. With LivePreview the ability to work collaboratively with other developers or clients becomes possible. Antivia has done a good job here in providing a write-once see-anywhere approach that will allow you to deploy to mobile devices whenever your users are ready.

I was able to get a demonstration of the data management facility called XWIS DataCenter. This is the server side tool that is used to prepare your data for the dashboards. XWIS DataCenter is open to any data source that can be accessed via SQL but contains wizard functions to connect to your BusinessObjects universes and Web Intelligence reports.

In Conclusion

This was just a quick look at a very capable new application for building enterprise dashboards and BI applications. If you are considering new interactive dashboards in your organization and want a fairly easy way to build for both desktop and mobile devices then give XWIS DecisionPoint a test drive.

As consultants we don’t often get to choose the technology for our clients but if asked I would recommend DecisionPoint when a interactive dashboard solution is needed.