Category Archives: Dates
Dates in Tableau are fun! Really! These posts give tips and tricks for using dates or demonstrate techniques for how to use dates in your dataviz and analytics.
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Fun with spatial files in Tableau 10.2
Posted on February 22, 2017 by Joshua Milligan in All, Dashboards, Data Blending & Joining, DataViz, Dates, Fun, Mapping / Geographic Visualization, New Features, Storytelling & Commentary.Tableau 10.2 is almost here! And it’s time to celebrate! One thing I’ve always wanted to do in Tableau is create interactive historical maps that changed based on the selected time-frame. We are fairly familiar with the shape of things now – countries, states, counties – but how did things look in the past? What […]
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Periodic Snapshots with Tableau Incremental Refresh
Posted on January 3, 2017 by Joshua Milligan in All, Calculations, Data Blending & Joining, Dates, Level of Detail Calcs.Happy New Year! Even as 2016 was winding down, I found myself with a challenge dealing with time. And I thought I’d share some of my thoughts about a possible approach. Here’s the challenge: You have a database with transactional data, that is data where the rows are inserted, updated and deleted based on events. […]
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Perspective: How a small dataviz tweak can tell a radically different data story
Posted on January 27, 2016 by Joshua Milligan in All, DataViz, Dates, Storytelling & Commentary.Is there a single best visualization for a given set of data? Should you always use a bar chart when looking at categorical data with a single metric? Is a timeline always best for viewing trends over time? Is there only one data story to tell? There are a couple of different viewpoints on this […]
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Partial Period Panic
Posted on January 5, 2016 by Joshua Milligan in All, Calculations, DataViz, Dates, Tableau Tip Tuesday.The Problem of Partial Periods So you built out that incredible Tableau* time series viz showing sales per week or number of widgets produced per month. Everything looked great as you wrapped this up right before Christmas break. Profits were up, sales were great, trends were positive. You come into the office excited to start […]
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Dates in Tableau make me want to tear my hair out!
Posted on April 14, 2015 by Joshua Milligan in All, Calculations, Dates, Storytelling & Commentary, Tableau Tip Tuesday, Tips and Tricks.Actually, it’s not dates in Tableau. Tableau does wonders with dates! What other tool allows you to connect to a data source with dates and have a built-in hierarchy where you can move different parts of the hierarchy around in the view? What other tool has its own built-in date dimension? There are imitators […]
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Want to understand how Tableau works and how you can use it like a master?
Joshua Milligan is a three-time Tableau Zen Master. His passion is training, mentoring, and helping people gain insights and make decisions based on their data through data visualization using Tableau. He is a principal consultant at Teknion Data Solutions, where he has served clients in numerous industries since 2004.
Joshua served as technical reviewer on several Tableau titles and is the author of the book Learning Tableau.
