Best of Tableau Web: March 2022

A highlight of tips, tricks and inspiration for Tableau and data visualization.

To mark the five-year publish anniversary of my book, The Big Book of Dashboards, we’re celebrating on Chart Chat (sign up here), and I also thought it a good time to look at how members of the Tableau Community are talking about dashboards these days.

First of all, I must direct you to Mark Bradbourne’s Real World Fake Data project. Every two weeks he provides a dashboard and the data behind it. Your job: Rebuild it. I am so inspired by the submissions, as seen in his Call Center recap, for example.

One trend I’ve noticed is more people using design tools to enhance their dashboards. Jacqui Moore outlines the pros and cons of this approach, with some advice on how to use design tools. One aspect Jacqui focuses on is using these tools for prototyping—a topic that Rafael Simancas from Playfair Data further explores in his deep dive on Figma.

The power of Tableau has increased significantly since my book was published, and it’s now possible to build much more powerful data-driven dashboards. Sena Sevval Inan from Biztory blogs about how she uses parameters and calculated fields to build dynamic dashboards.

I also take inspiration from the trends we see in the Iron Viz competition, and I want to thank the judges who worked so hard to assess the results. What does it take? Christina Gorga reflected on her experience as a judge. An Iron Viz entry isn’t the same as a business dashboard, but there are always tricks you can reuse in your dashboard work: for example, Christina calls out the carefully crafted tooltips and text objects she saw.

Speaking of Iron Viz, I’m very excited that we’ll be back with a live, in-person Iron Viz at Tableau Conference in Las Vegas in May. I hope to see you there, whether you attend virtually or in person!

Collage of colorful data visualizations featured in Best of Tableau Web

With that, enjoy Best of the Tableau Web with tips, tricks, inspiration and more produced by the Tableau community. For updates throughout the month, follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn, and check out the list of blogs I follow for Best of the Tableau Web. If you don’t see yours on the list, I invite you to add it here.