Category Archives: Top Tips

The Evolution of the Speed Record

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Hi all,

Oh dear – it’s that time of year again. Time for the Iron Viz competition. The first challenge this year is the Wikipedia challenge. Create a viz, any viz, so long as the data comes from Wikipedia.

1. The Idea

There are tons of data on Wikipedia. Trouble is, much of it is in a nightmare format and takes a lot of tidying up. I wasn’t cool with doing much of that this time so reasonably tidy data was a must. I also wanted something with depth, and an element of competition, danger and heroism. And I love technology so wanted that as well. All in all a tough ask.

But then I stumbled across the perfect topic – how speed records have evolved over time. Ticks all the boxes and could be a nice use of Story Points.

So that was it – “The Evolution of the Speed Record” was GO!

kings

The Evolution of the Speed Record!

 

2. Data

I got the data from 3 Wikipedia pages.

kand

An example of the land speed record data

The data has enough variety and richness to satisfy my requirements. It is also pretty consistent between pages so makes consolidation into Excel a lot easier. I did have to remove entries that referred to record attempts that were not ratified, and I also had to standardise on mph vs kph as well as distance miles vs kilometers. But with those caveats, I’d gotten me a pretty decent dataset.

It was also cool that most rows linked off to pages about the pilot and the craft used, each with some neat images for use in the viz. Plenty of room to supplement this data set should that be required. I also managed to find some clips of some of the drivers on YouTube.

 

3. Viz Design

The evolution of the record featured trials and tribulations, joy and pain, heroes and villains. So all in all this was a great opportunity to try Story Points for the first time.

axisThe overall look and feel took some arriving at and I’d like to thank Kelly & Chris for assisting with the peer review process. My original version made use of custom “speed-style” fonts to give the impression of speed, but we eventually decided that the real ethos of the whole story was the nostalgia and ‘Pathe’ News‘ style of flat capped heroes with handlebar mustaches pushing the boundaries of technology. So we switched to a style that sort of represented a 1930’s newspaper. I was really pleased with the final look and feel of it. Deciding the style really helped the story design of the charts. I tried to be as minimal as possible, removing unnecessary chart ink and distractions.

paper

Operation Paperclip

I wanted to give a feeling of progressing along a chronological timeline, whilst interspersing with ‘infographic’ style information pages. In particular there was a great story to tell about Germany and Operation Paperclip, that made a great infographic.

 

 

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Embedded minimal Wikipedia page

I obviously wanted to use some advanced techniques so used the individual Wikipedia pages for some of the pilots to link off to an embedded web page. A masterstroke was working out that if I added “?printable=yes” to the URL it would give me a stripped back render of the page, that almost looked like a 1930’s newspaper, fitting the theme perfectly. I was really happy with that.

 

 

Screen Shot 2015-03-14 at 12.02.30

Embedded YouTube page

There’s also a page that links off to a YouTube video of the driver. I like that one, as the links are all monochromatic grainy film with appropriately stiff-upper-lipped voiceover. Excellent. I did worry a little about the ethics of including these videos as some of them show the final moments of the driver’s life. I think I’ve been respectful enough in my overall viz to justify inclusion though. I also added an old-school TV border to give a little bit more visual appeal.

So overall I was really pleased with this. A nice style, several good stories and a use of some advanced multimedia techniques.

 

4. Challenges

As mentioned this was my first use of Story Points. Unfortunately it turned out to be a frustrating experience. The feature, whilst undoubtedly useful, is in need of customisation and doesn’t provide a smooth user experience. One for the Tableau dev team to look at for sure.

Another challenge was the fact that the new Tableau Public site has sneakily been changed to https. That only becomes apparent when accessing a published viz using Chrome. Make sure your links to embedded content are https or they won’t work.

 

5. Analysis & Story

So what can we take from this story? Here are some of the key observations that Tableau has allowed me to glean from the dataset.

  • Records are dominated by only 3 nations, with France killing it in early years with their brilliant aviators.
  • It took a while for airspeed to get going, in fact land speeds were higher for a long time.
  • Germany’s poor record really didn’t tell the full story, their brilliant scientists being key to the USA’s great NASA missions in later years. Interesting how their previous misdemeanours were overlooked though…
  • Most record-breaking attempts advanced the speed slightly, with the occasional big jump.
  • The incredible Malcolm Campbell and his son Donald held an amazing 21 records.
  • Oddly, no-one seems to be bothered about records anymore, there hasn’t been a new record since 1997. Or is it too hard / dangerous now?

So that’s it. I hope you enjoy the visualisation. If you do then please consider voting for me in the IronViz competition, should this make the Elite8 twitter vote-off thing.

Regards, Paul

How to initiate IM / Skype / Chat / LastFM session from a Tableau dashboard

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Top Tips

Hello everyone. Before I start this I have to admit I nicked the idea completely from Dave Hart of Interworks, who came up with it when he was working with us. But he doesn’t blog or tweet so that leaves me to claim all the glory… Actually I’m just passing on his superior knowledge..

Many of you probably use mailto: actions in your Tableau dashboards, to kick off a mail to someone that might be highlighted in a viz etc. And you might also have some sort of internal IM system like MS Lync or something like that.

Well you can just as easily initiate a chat session to one or multiple recipients using Tableau.

This uses the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to open the session in whatever IM client is in use. You just need to open Tableau Server like this

tabadmin set vizqlserver.url_scheme_whitelist sip
tabadmin set vizqlserver.url_scheme_whitelist im
tabadmin restart

sip: allows Lync to lookup people using their email address
im: tells Lync to open it as a group chat

This is an example of an URI Scheme. There are dozens of others, such as callto: which tells mobile phones to call as well as facetime: and of course mailto:. 

Once you’ve opened the server up you can then create a Tableau action to fire off the command. Note that if you try and IM yourself it will usually default to email.

im:<sip:kelly.smith@company.com>
im:<sip:kelly.smith@company.com><sip:james.anderson@company.com>
im:<sip:kelly.smith@company.com><sip:james.anderson@company.com><sip:rob.jones@company.com>

When it comes to the action Tableau won’t let you use multiple items without specifying a delimiter so what you do is use “><” as the delimiter and then put [url encoded] “<” and “>” around the data field.

Anyway I posted this on the Tableau Forum and there’s a workbook attached to that post so you should be able to download it and see how you get on. I reckon there’s some potentially way cool stuff possible using URI schemes. There’s also lastfm:, spotify: and skype: amongst them – so much fun to be had here I think.

Forum post: http://community.tableausoftware.com/thread/155429

Regards, Paul

Shapes, Icons and Flags for your Tableau viz

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Top Tips

Hi all,

Simple one this. A list of some resources that might be useful for supplementing your Tableau vizzes.

I keep finding myself going to these resources time after time. Feel free to suggest other go-to sites for your vizzes.

Icons

  • Screen Shot 2014-10-20 at 13.27.33FlatIcon – Loads of free icons. Multiple formats & sizes. I love the sketched nature of a lot of these. Minimal and neat but with a lot of character.
  • BrainyIcons – Similar stuff here. Cool hand-drawn style looks great.

Flags

  • Screen Shot 2014-10-20 at 13.25.53FreeFlagIcons – Wide variety of shapes for all your national flag requirements. Very neat and professional looking and a wide variety of shapes and styles . Ideal for any viz requiring custom flag shapes.

Maps

  • Tableaumapping.bi – Want gesopatial data for your maps? Allan Walker Screen Shot 2014-10-20 at 13.28.58
    (@allanwalkerit) & Craig Bloodworth (@craigbloodworth) have you covered in this excellent resource. If you don’t see what you need here then ping them on Twitter – what they don’t know about maps aint worth knowing.
  • ColorBrewer – Get that map colour scheme looking just right with this tool

Review Services

  • HelpMeViz – Get some constructive advice on that viz from @helpmeviz.

That’s it. Hope these prove useful.

5 Top Tableau Time Saving Tips

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Top Tips

Hello everyone. Time for a new series on VizNinja. I’m calling it Triple T – Tableau Top Tips.

This is where I list my favourite useful Tableau features. They may be well-known already, or maybe even not so – let me know if you find any of the tips helpful. I’m going to hopefully open this up to Alteryx also as I get more familiar with that tool.

I wasn’t going to post these as I thought that hey – everyone knows these as they’re so obvious and simple. And then the first person I spoke to about Revert to Saved had no idea it existed. So if you think these are all dead obvious then that’s cool, but someone out there might find them useful.

Tip 1 -“Revert to saved”

I’m a serial saver, so the Tableau & Alteryx not having autosave features isn’t a show stopper for me, although it would certainly be nice to have. I know it annoys many bloggers.

I am however, repeatedly going back to my saved workbook version. Using most applications you’d close the GUI and reload the file. With Tableau – just hit F12 and your workbook is back to the saved version.

revert

Simple, but saves me a load of mouse clicks every day.

Tip 2 – Use the repository

Another great example of the attention to detail that Tableau show is the “My Tableau Repository” that I’m sure you’re all familiar with.

My tip here is make sure you use it properly. However tempting it may be to save that workbook anywhere in the repository, ensure you stick to the naming convention. Workbooks in the workbook directory, datasources in the datasources directory. Won’t be an issue immediately if you don’t but as your usage of the tool grows you’ll thank yourself for keeping things neat and tidy.

Tip 3 – Swap Rows & Columns

As simple as it sounds. Hit CTRL-W to swap your shelves around. Hit it again to revert.

Tip 4 – Tooltip Persistence

It really annoys me how tooltips disappear after approx 8 seconds or so. I use them all the time to provide context in meetings.

If you want the tooltip to hang around, then position your mouse over either one of the command buttons or one of the actions / links on the tooltip (if present). That will stop it from clearing. When you want it to go then just move the mouse away.

Not sure if it has been resolved in later versions. I know there was an enhancement request in.

tooltipI

Tip 5 – Cell Size Hotkeys

Don’t bother fiddling around with grabbing the edges of cells with your mouse. Use these hotkeys under the “Format” menu of Tableau desktop.

cellsize

Ok that’s it for the first TTT. More to come later. Hit me with your TTT’s in the comments or @paulbanoub.

Cheers, Paul