I need to learn PowerBI, as soon as possible (per client request). So, I spent much of last week using it. I wrote about the depressing experience on Twitter. I also commented on this post, and its author, Vitali Burla, invited me to show an example of a chart that can be done in Tableau … Read more
How do Excel and Tableau compare when actually making a chart? I couldn’t find such post, so I wrote one. I’ll create a simple chart, a population pyramid, and comment on the process. To make it a bit more interesting, we’ll compare a certain population in 1986 with the estimates for 2050. The Data Let’s … Read more
After creating wordless instructions for making charts in Excel, here is the Tableau version. This post discusses similarities and differences between both tools. Check out the e-books at the bottom! How to make a chart To make a chart, you must select the data, encode the data into visual objects, format those objects, and add text … Read more
If you are an Excel user, are you aware of how flexible it is? Do you really take advantage of this flexibility when making charts? You can simply enter a few values and some (almost) random cells and visualize them. You can add empty rows or use dummy variables. When it comes to formatting, you … Read more
Most users love Excel, non-users hate it. When it comes to data visualization, Excel is generally dispised, except by those that have to make dozens of charts every single day. I call this the Excel Stockolm Syndrome. These are the forsaken data visualization users that keep making 3D pies when they should know better by now. … Read more
Well, here is my first chart in Tableau, finally! After publishing my experiments with population pyramids (using Excel), I thought I could try Tableau Public with the same dataset from the US Census Bureau. Here is the result. I never really played before with Tableau Public and it took my less than an hour to … Read more
My life sucks. Here I am, getting old by the minute, reinventing the wheel every single day, forcing tools to do things they don’t want to do, too busy with the boring details and forgetting the whole picture hidden behind them. Yes, my life sucks. Oh, how I envy that guy over there! He chose … Read more
I’ll be in London tomorrow, November 16, for the Tableau 6.0 Tour. This is my first trip to London in many years and I hope this is also the starting point of a much closer relationship with Tableau. I believe that you can’t improve the way people display data visually if: you tell/show them things … Read more