Author Archives: Alan Eldridge
Points and Polygons in Tableau 10.2
I have previously written about how we continue to add new features to Tableau and this means that we can develop better solutions to previously difficult problems. I’d like to present another example of this – where we want to … Continue reading
Filled maps and low bandwidth connections
I regularly work from my home office which is where my demo server is also located. Having a gigabit Ethernet connection to the server means network bandwidth/latency isn’t something I pay any attention to most of the time. However, the other … Continue reading
Updated ABS boundaries for 2016
Edit July 2017 – It seems a lot of people are still coming to this page from search engines. If this is you, hi! If you are using Tableau 10.2 or later let me be clear… you no longer need these files … Continue reading
Description fields that work across record types
[Today’s post is just a little trick – not that hard to work out. But I liked it, and it’s my blog, so I’m writing about it. Also, after all the efficient workbook and densification stuff I could use the break.] I’ve … Continue reading
Manufacturing a polygon from a single lat/lon coordinate
A little while ago I wrote a blog post on how to use pivot and densification to create great arc lines on a map without having to read the source data multiple times. In that example, each record had two fields I could … Continue reading
Best Practices for Designing Efficient Tableau Workbooks, the V10.0 edition
With the impending release of Tableau 10, I have been refreshing my whitepaper on how to author efficient Tableau workbooks. Once again, I would like to acknowledge that the document is a distillation of materials written by many authors. Much of … Continue reading
You Can Never Be Too Hexy…
Some time ago I wrote a post about how to create hexagonal heat maps. Central to the technique is the need for a “path” field to plot the 6 vertices around the polygon marks. As this is a synthetic value it won’t exist in … Continue reading
Choosing the right calculation type… encore!
A couple of days ago, Keith Helfrich (@KeithHelfrich posted a question to twitter about updating an old calculation selection diagram Bethany Lyon and I presented in a hands-on training session at Tableau Conference a couple of years ago. I responded with this diagram from … Continue reading
45 degree reference line with dynamic axes
I read a great blog post today from Andy Kriebel where he shows how to create a 45-degree reference line on a scatter plot: http://vizwiz.blogspot.com.au/2016/03/tableau-tip-tuesday-how-to-create-45.html His solution is very elegant, using a trend line against a secondary axis to create the … Continue reading
Choosing the right calculation type…
[Last year at Tableau Conference in Vegas, I co-presented a session on this topic with the fantastic Bethany Lyons from our UK offices. I delivered it again last week at Tableau Conference on Tour in Sydney to a very positive … Continue reading
The Last Data Bender 