And the Winners of #TableauTipsMonth Are...

March has been a month of sharing. On the Tableau Public blog alone, no less than 12 how-to posts were penned, with exactly half of them being contributions from guest bloggers. Let's pause and thank all our amazing authors for their brilliant tutorials!

The #TableauTipsMonth hashtag on Twitter also got a lot of love from all over the world, with people submitting their best tips from as far as India and Australia.

As we mentioned in a previous post, we planned to highlight the best of your tweeted tips. But we had a very hard time deciding between all the amazing suggestions received. Only after a fervent discussion did we settle on the attribution of the following six 2016 Distinguished Awards:

• Most Useful - goes to the tutorial that is the most practical and useful
• Most Sage - goes to the blog post that is the most wise and insightful
• Most Mind-Blowing - goes to the how-to guide that is the most ingenious and creative in it's approach
• Most Wacky - goes to the guide that is the most off-the-wall and crazy
• Most Hacky - goes to the technique that breaks all the rules and does things it probably shouldn't
• Most Beautiful - goes to the tip that most allows us to enhance the look-and-feel of our visualizations

Most Useful: David Pires

An avid vizzer and regular contributor to the Tableau community, David wrote a total of four tutorials this month, including a post with tips from his spouse. David's tips help both beginners and advanced users of Tableau Public. You can find all of them on his blog.

David's winning tip explains how to create multilingual dashboards. Follow this tip to build vizzes viewable in various languages like the one below. As a multinational team, we could absolutely relate to this topic and will definitely make use of this tip. Congrats, David!

Most Sage: Kelly Martin

A Tableau Zen Master hiding behind the sweet pseudonym @VizCandy, Kelly started using Tableau Public back in 2010. You bet she has some good dashboarding advice to share with rookies! Her "Top 10 Dashboard Don'ts" blog post was a mass of wisdom on common mistakes to be avoided when analyzing and visualizing data. So now you know: Next time you're asked to build a viz based on pivoted Excel tables, just pretend you hair is on fire!

You'll find other high quality learning material on Kelly's blog and her Tableau Public profile.

Most Mind-Blowing: Curtis Harris

As is often the case in life, beauty lies in simplicity. This tip by Curtis Harris was no more than a GIF posted on Twitter, but it made us jump out of our seats. WHAT?! We'd been using Tableau all this time without realizing that SHIFT + END + a click allows you to clear all the default selected sheets when creating a dashboard action!

Most Wacky: Rody Zakovich

An active participant in the ongoing #MakeoverMonday challenge , Rody was invited by Andy Kriebel to write a guest blog post on how to build dynamic 100-mark unit chart in tooltip using ASCII characters. That's a creative way of hacking one of the most awaited features in Tableau: charts within tooltips.

Below is the workbook in which he teaches this new technique step-by-step:

Most Hacky: Curtis Harris (Again!)

Yes, Curtis Harris already won the Most Mind-Blowing Tip Award, but we couldn't find any submission hackier than his tutorial on resetting parameters with the JavaScript API. In his own words, he came up with it while trying to "reset many parameters to their default value without resetting any filters that have already been applied".

Not sure you understand what he meant? Then just have a look at the dashboard he built to illustrate this concept:

Still don't understand? That's because you will build the reset buttons directly in your web page, as showns in his how-to!

Most Beautiful: Matt Chambers

Many a beautiful viz have been created by Matt Chambers, and his how-to post on hex tile maps in Tableau will allow many more authors to buiid aesthetically beautiful tile maps in Tableau. An unassuming author, Matt gave credit to Brittany Fong's tile map post, which inspired him this hexagonal variation.

And now, it is time to close #TableauTipsMonth and congratulate all of our award winners and guest bloggers one more time. We'd also like to thank all the Tableau Public afficionados who shared their favorite tips during the past five weeks. We have, once again, been amazed by your generosity and creativity!