Category Archives: Visualizations

2012 Fight For Air Climb

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On March 18th, 2012 I had the pleasure of helping to fight lung cancer by racing up 31 flights of stairs as part of the GNU Fitness team at the 2012 Fight For Air Climb in San Diego California.

Being the data geek I am, I was able to wrangle the results from the American Lung Association crew and crafted up the visuals below. Start by selecting a ‘class’ as it’s called in the bar chart, then see a line chart of how fast those top 10 individuals flew up the stairs, then lastly in the bottom see all the details for the competitors in that class.

Credit Jeff Pettiross (@pettiross) for his inspiration on ‘flow’ of information for this display below.

And if you want to do some fun comparisons between you and your friends use this visual.

Delivering WOW through Data

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Tony Hseih, CEO of Zappos.com, wrote in his book Delivering Happiness that their first objective is to Deliver WOW through Service.

In the book he described a parody of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for delivering WOW.

At the bottom layer you have Meeting Expectations…in BI this is like replacing the reports users already get with a better backend database system.

The second layer up from the bottom is Meeting Desires…in BI this is when you add the functionality to some reports users have been wanting, or upping the performance of some reports to more tolerable levels. You haven’t got WOW at this point, but you’re doing pretty good.

At the top you have Meeting Unrecognized Need…in BI this is delivering to users a totally new way of looking at and accessing their information. Traditional BI projects would seldom reach this level within their first 3 years of execution however, with tools like Tableau Software hordes of regular business users are able to visualize their data in a whole new way within minutes of completing the install.

Furthermore, with Tableau Server, technology groups are able to deliver an enterprise class meta-data management and online collaboration platform truly enabling self-service Business Intelligence.

If you’ve not worked with Tableau yet I highly recommend downloading a trial and seeing for yourself. With any luck, you’ll get more WOW from your data than you ever could have before with traditional platforms and methods.

Buy Tony’s Book

Finding your Tableau Server PostgreSQL database port

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Ever have issues connecting to your Tableau Server PostgreSQL database due to a port issue? If so, you’re not alone! I too have struggled with this before and after hitting it just the second time I did some digging and fond how to determine the port of the Tableau Server PostgreSQL database. Here you go:

  1. Browse to your Tableau Server config location and open up this file:
    [install drive]:\Tableau\Tableau Server\data\tabsvc\config\connections.yml
  2. Find the line in there showing the port “pgsql.port: XXXX”

Then when connecting to Tableau Servers PostgreSQL database you simply enter that value into the ‘port’ textbox in the connection form and viola!

Hope this helps!

How to add an ‘All’ parameter option in Tableau

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Ever wanted to include an ‘All’ option in your Tableau parameters? Simple! Here’s how:

  1. Create your parameter with the options available. In this example I’m creating one for [Region]. Make sure to manually add the ‘ALL’ option.
  2. Drag the corresponding field you will be filtering on to the filters shelf
  3. Right click on the field and choose ‘Filter’ then the ‘Condition’ tab
  4. In the ‘By Formula’ radio option on the bottom enter the formula below, replacing my [Region] fields with your own
  5. Revel in your accomplishment


IFNULL([Region],'Null') = IF [Region Parameter] != 'ALL' THEN [Region Parameter] ELSE IFNULL([Region], 'Null') END

Customizing Tableau Server Logos and Icons

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When deploying Tableau Server for a client, I often find that clients wish to customize their Tableau Server environment with their own branding. The Tableau Server Administration Guide offers some options for customizing Tableau Server however it is limited in what it allows.

Here are the default options that you can customize using tabadmin commands found in the Tableau Server Administration Guide.

Changing the Name

You can customize Tableau Server’s look and feel by customizing the name that
appears in screen tips and messages. To change the name:

  1. Open a command prompt as an administrator and type the following:


    2. 32-bit: cd "C:\Program Files\Tableau\Tableau Server\7.0\bin"
    64-bit: cd "C:\Program Files (x86)\Tableau\Tableau Server\7.0\bin"

  2. Change the name by typing the following:


    3. tabadmin customize name "new_name"

    In the above line, replace “new_name” with the text that you want to appear as
    the name on the server. Example: tabadmin customize “Company
    Server”

  3. Restart the server for the change to take effect by typing:

    4. tabadmin restart

Changing the Logo

You can customize Tableau Server’s look and feel by customizing the logo that appears
on the Tableau Server login page and in the left column of most pages. To change the
logo:

Note: This does not include the site favicon or Tableau Server Icon displayed when viewing a dashboard. More on that below.

  1. Open a command prompt as an administrator and type the following:


    2. 32-bit: cd "C:\Program Files\Tableau\Tableau Server\7.0\bin"
    64-bit: cd "C:\Program Files (x86)\Tableau\Tableau Server\7.0\bin"

  2. Change the logo by typing the following:

    3. tabadmin customize logo "C:\My Pictures\logo.png"

    In the above line, replace “C:\My Pictures\logo.png” with the path and file
    name of the image that you want to appear as the logo on the server. For best
    results, use an image that is 125 pixels x 35 pixels in size. The image can be a
    .png, jpg, or .gif file.

  3. Restart the server for the change to take effect by typing:

    4. tabadmin restart

 

Customizing the Tableau Server icons

(Not officially supported by Tableau)
In this example E is the root of where I installed Tableau. I do this so that I can have a faster disk with more storage capacity than the C drive. I recommend this practice for all instances where you can afford it.

E:\Tableau\Tableau Server\7.0\server.ico
E:\Tableau\Tableau Server\7.0\wgserver\public\favicon.ico
E:\Tableau\Tableau Server\7.0\wgserver\public\v_70001201131054\favicon.ico
E:\Tableau\Tableau Server\7.0\wgserver\public\v_70001201131054\images\server-logo.gif
E:\Tableau\Tableau Server\7.0\wgserver\public\v_70001201131054\images\tableau-icon.gif

If you try this solution and find additional images that need to be replace, or if anyone wants to make a script for this please reply in the comments with what you found!