Nov 15, 2023

Data Mapping For Everyone

I’m just coming back from Vizit Berlin, a two-day-event organized from the Tableau community (thank you Sarah, Heidi, Annabelle & Tore) for the community. It was so great to reconnect with old friends and make new friends. I also had the pleasure to give a presentation on the first day, where I introduced two ways […]

Sep 15, 2023

14 Tips to Let Your Tableau Income Statement Shine

I recently shared my makeover of the Tableau Income Statement (+Budget) accelerator on LinkedIn and on Tableau Public. It’s a pure Tableau viz, without any data preparation or map layers in place. I have used several tricks here, to achieve this layout in a one sheet view and I’m happy to share them all 🤓. […]

Nov 16, 2022

Converting NetCDF files to .hyper for use in Tableau

Recently, Klaus Schulte asked for some help with wrestling NetCDF files into Tableau. To help out, I wrote up a little Python script to pull the data out and convert it to a .hyper file for use in Tableau and figured that I should go ahead and document how to work with NetCDF in Tableau and […]

Oct 12, 2022

World Population Cartograms

In one of my recents projects, I’ve created a world population cartogram. In such a map, country size represents population. Each one-by-one square stands for 500,000 people. Each country exists of as many squares as needed to represent its population. About Cartograms According to Max Roser, founder of OurWorldInData, this is “the map we need […]

Oct 6, 2022

One-Sheet Marginal Histograms

Marginal histograms are great to find patterns in your data. Especially when working with date or time fields, they’re one of my preferred chart type to start my analysis. Steve Wrexler has written about the usefulness of marginal histograms in more depth in this blog. Make sure to check it out (and all other blogs […]

Apr 4, 2022

The New Tableau Specialist Exam

Greetings! Lukas here from learningtableau.com. I asked Klaus if I could do a guest post providing an update to Christine’s terrific series on becoming a Tableau Specialist in 2019. Christine gives a great explanation not only of preparing for the exam but also of how to participate in the Tableau community. Updates to Tableau’s Certifications […]

Mar 4, 2022

Custom Axes in Tableau

In this blog I’d like to share one of the coolest things I’ve ever created in Tableau. But what is so cool about this viz? You’ve probably already seen thousands of such curvy line charts. (If you want to learn how to create them, read Kevin Flerlage’s blog on it or even take his template […]

Jan 12, 2022

Using Tableau Public Templates Efficiently

Tableau Public is an incredible resource. 2M authors who have published more than 5M visualizations and billions of views, these are the latest figures I’ve heart last year. That’s stunning. I personally also made my first steps with Tableau on Tableau Public and used it ever since to share my own visualizations with the community. […]

Oct 17, 2021

Cost-Plus-Pricing with Tableau & Tableau Prep

I’ve just finished a project where I had a very interesting and fun challenge: Create a Cost-Plus-Pricing Tool in Tableau. “No, you can’t do pricing in a BI Tool”, or “We need flexibility for our pricing tool, that only Excel gives us” is something I’ve already heart many times, when discussing about pricing. But of […]

Dec 15, 2020

Setting up an Automated Data-Pipeline — From the Web to Tableau Public

In my work as an analyst and consultant as well as in my work at university, there are few things more satisfying to me, than building automated data-pipelines, with an effective and elegant Tableau or Tableau Public visualization as the icing on the cake: set up once – runs for a lifetime. There are countless […]

Oct 12, 2020

Write-back for Everyone: Parameter Query Language for Tableau (Part 1)

by Rosario Gauna & Klaus Schulte Write-back for Everyone There are many use cases where it’s necessary to add user defined data to the existing data to do or to complete an analysis. Some typical examples: Sales/profit planning or forecasting: What will product group/customer/region sales be at the end of the year/next year? What will […]

Aug 25, 2020

Drill-Downs and Drill-Ups in Tableau without CONTAINS

As a constant visitor on Klaus’ blog I came across the blog series of Drill-Downs and Drill-Ups in Tableau. Rosario introduced the general technique in this post. Rosario and Klaus leverage the technique in their piece on Exploration Dashboards with Multiple Drill-Downs. Klaus, Rosario, and Robert Crocker also presented a use case in the context of P&Ls.

Aug 13, 2020

Squared Sankey P&Ls in Tableau

Squared Sankey P&Ls in Tableau is a joint work of Liam Spencer & Klaus Schulte. Earlier this year, I (Klaus) published a P&L visualization, that grabbeb some attention on Twitter:

Aug 8, 2020

Drill-Down and Drill-Up without SPLIT and FINDNTH

Drill-Down and Drill-Up without SPLIT and FINDNTH. — This post is an addition to previous posts on this blog and on Rosario Gauna’s blog. Rosario introduced the general technique in this post. Rosario and I leverage the technique in our piece on Exploration Dashboards with Multiple Drill-Downs. Together with Robert Crocker, we’ve also presented a […]

Jul 14, 2020

Creating Lollipop-Jitter Plots in Tableau

A few days ago, I came across this tweet by We are R-Ladies, who linked an original post by Cédric Scherer from last year. Cédric developed R code to create something that I would call a Lollipop-Jitter plot. This cool chart has it all, the overall picture and the granular details. Really great work! Also […]

May 26, 2020

Preparing the Desktop Specialist Exam: A student’s guide

Christine Rietmann, who is one of my students at Münster University of Applied Sciences in Germany shared her journey of preparing and passing the Tableau Desktop Specialist exam on this blog some months ago.

May 5, 2020

Drill-Down & Up P&Ls in Tableau

Drill-Down & Up P&Ls Tableau is the next part of a series of posts on visualizing financial data on this blog recently. Visualizing P&L Statements reflects the general use of visuals in the context of P&Ls and gives examples for bad and good practice. Adding Custom Sub-Totals in Tableau describes four solutions to combine normal […]

Apr 15, 2020

Multiple Drill-Downs in Tableau

Multiple Drill-Downs in Tableau. — Some weeks ago, Rosario published a blog where she presented a technique to both drill-down and drill-up a view as a single sheet solution using the Internal Data Densification technique for the drill-up. With this solution, drill-down in combination with drill-up dashboards have become really suitable for everyday dashboards.

Apr 9, 2020

Spot it! vs. Dobble – Gaming in Tableau

I’m very happy to publish my first game in Tableau, created in a collaboration with Tableau community superstar Kevin Flerlage. Spot It and Dobble are the same game. The game is simple enough for a 5 year old and incredibly fun for all ages. So how do you play? The deck contains 55 round cards.  Each […]

Mar 7, 2020

Adding Custom Sub-Totals in Tableau

Introduction When it comes to visualizing financial data, it is often required to combine cumulative and non-cumulative values in one visualization (and yes: tables are also visualizations 🤓), like for example in a Profit & Loss statement. While positions like revenues, cost of sales, selling expenses or income taxes are non-cumulative, we also have sub-totals […]