Best of the Tableau web: Celebrating tips and tricks

Hello everyone, I hope you’re all doing well. Welcome to my monthly round up of the best Tableau content from the community. This month, we’re looking back at content from March. None of us need reminding that March was unlike any other month we have experienced. I’ve taken great solace in seeing how many of you are continuing to contribute ideas and thoughts, big or small.

If you know me, you know I love the big, deep, “thinky” pieces you write, but I also have a great affection for the simple, quick tips and tricks you all find. To me, these posts reflect the race of innovation between software development teams and an active user community. As the development team pushes out new features, the community innovates and creates new applications previously unthought of. Some of those get adopted into the platform itself and the cycle repeats itself.

In March, I particularly enjoyed seeing Robert Crocker’s idea for adding bars to the top and bottom of a gantt chart. Luke Stanke made an interactive colour legend and Ryan Sleeper showed us how to do conditional formatting in Tableau. Who knows—some of these ideas might end up as native features in Tableau. Our development team loves to see these ideas. If you see a tip or trick that you think should become a fully fledged feature, why not suggest it in our Ideas forum?

Finally: if you’re thinking about starting a Tableau blog, tips and tricks are a great place to start. That’s how I started 10 years ago and it helped me find my voice as I developed my Tableau skills. Don’t worry—if you think someone else might have discovered and written about your idea before—your words will bring a new voice and perspective.

As always, enjoy the list! Follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn as I try and share many of these throughout the month. Also, you can check out which blogs I am following here. If you don’t see yours on the list, you can add it here.

Eric Parker Switch an Image with a Selection in a Tableau Dashboard
Craig Steven Sorting a Multiple Measure Parameter
Shaun Davis Five Ways to Communicate Data When the Stakes Are High
Lorna Brown #TableauTipTuesday Week 11: Using Parameter Actions to maintain ranks
Luke Stanke How to build Interactive Legends in Tableau
Ryan Sleeper The Easiest Way to Make a Toggle in Tableau
Vikash Bhardwaj How to use Excel to write long Tableau formulas in seconds
Anders Wold Drill Down Bar Chart using Parameter Actions
Mark Bradbourne Selection by Category – The Feature Forgotten
Robert Crocker How to Add Top and Bottom Borders to Gantt Charts in Tableau
Gwilym Lockwood Calculating dynamic Z scores in Tableau

David Murphy What is Tableau Public Viz of the Day? #tableau #tableaupublic #datafam
Kevin Flerlage How I Created This Spiral Chart…and Why I Won’t Do It Again
Sarah Bartlett Tips for Running a Virtual Tableau User Group
Alireza Karduni Visualizing Categorical Data with Disproportionate Values Using Du Bois Wrapped Bar Charts!
Marc Reid Tableau Metrics
Brandi Beals Lift Up Your Career with Data Analytics
Ken Flerlage Packed Bubble & Pie Art in Tableau
Tim Ngwena Making an overview of Tableau using the sketch-noting technique.
Kendra Allenspach and Keith Dykstra Collaborating in Tableau: Neat Lessons Learned from Messy Projects, Part 1

Jack Parry How to use the Salesforce Connector in Prep Builder 2020.2 Beta
Carl Allchin How to... deal with Unwanted Characters

Luke Stanke Building a Custom Color Palette In Tableau
Keith Dykstra Using Parameter Actions for Interactive Data Storytelling in Tableau
Alexander Mou Enhancing Text Tables with Visual Background
Natalia Miteva How to create a simple 4-colour quadrant in Tableau
Rati Alternative to Venn : an Up Set plot
Ryan Sleeper How to Make a Boolean Toggle in Tableau
Kevin Flerlage Building a Guided Instructions Panel

Andy Kriebel #TableauTipTuesday: How to Use Set Actions to Maintain the Rank of a Dimension Upon Filtering
Mark Bradbourne Dynamic Parameters, Default Values and the Flexibility to Choose
Andrew Lehm How to action filter when using set/parameter action drill-downs in Tableau

Rati Visualization challenges - Tableau Center of Enablement
Eugenia Kis An Introduction to Tableau’s New Data Model