Best of the Tableau Web: Sparking creativity and new ways of thinking

Hello, Tableau community! Welcome to Andy's May round-up of the best content being produced by you, the Tableau community.

Hello everyone, and welcome to my monthly round-up of what’s been happening on the Tableau blog scene. Thank you once again to everyone sharing ideas and content during these challenging times.

Last month, I talked about collaborations, specifically looking at individuals coming together to work on a single project. Of course, collaboration can manifest in many different ways, and this month, I’m looking at other ideas. Each of these examples might spark ideas to help you build your technical, creative, and analytical skills.

First of all, there are the flagship community projects: Workout Wednesday, Makeover Monday, Project Health Viz, Sport Viz Sunday, and more. Each of these will get you involved in a community of like-minded people who can help grow your skills. On top of that, each project and collaboration are opportunities to share your own learnings. I especially enjoy seeing explanation posts, such as Rajeev Panday’s description of a Workout Wednesday that used set actions. Solving the puzzle develops your skills, but working out how to explain a solution will develop them further.

Another example is Linday Betzendahl’s design breakdown of her Iron Quest/Project Health Viz project. This one focuses on her use of layout containers. This reminds us that successful analytics is about the design just as much as it is about the technical power.

Finally, collaboration can mean doing ongoing work together. I want to highlight the Alphabet Project, run by Adam Green and Laura Sandford. Throughout the year, they go from A to Z, choosing a topic for each letter. May’s letter and project topic was J for Jewels (Adam, Laura) and K for King (Adam, Laura). These are somehow my favorite projects. They are ongoing and they introduce a constraint. Constraints force creativity—and this is clear in all the projects done so far.

I couldn’t focus on May’s blog, talk about creative endeavors, and not give a shout-out to Neil Richards. His solo project in May was to create a visualization every day (every day!) inspired by “Flood,” an album by the band, They Might Be Giants.

I hope those ideas give you inspiration. Finding creative outlets is a great way to get involved in the community. Adam, Laura, and Neil, in particular, indicate something very important: your project doesn’t have to be big, profound, or about mass participation. Sometimes, the simplest ideas can trigger great results.

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.

New bloggers added last month: Marian Eerens, Jiselle Howe, Nadine Gorr and Daniel Rowlands, DataDumpChat, Andrew Watson, Darragh Murray, Soha Elghany, and Evelina Judeikyte.