Category Archives: Fun

Tableau is Fun! Here you’ll find games and fun dashboards – but also some practical lessons mixed in.

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  Have a Maestro Christmas and Tableau New Year!

  Posted on December 13, 2017 by Joshua Milligan in All, Dashboards, Data Shape & Structure, Fun, Tableau Prep (Maestro).

  Tableau’s new data prep tool, Maestro, is now in public beta, and I’m loving it!  While the first beta doesn’t necessarily include all the features that might soon make it to a production release, what blows me away is the overall paradigm.  It brings the intuitiveness and transparency that Tableau brought to visual analytics and […]

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  Tableau, you sunk my Battleship!

  Posted on May 22, 2017 by Joshua Milligan in All, Dashboards, Fun, Pushing the Limits.

  Ah, games and Tableau – two of my favorite things together! And it isn’t all just about fun and games, it’s about learning and pushing the limits to see what Tableau can do and how to best use the features and capabilities of Tableau to turn an idea into something that works! I’ll have a few blog posts […]

  Post Tagged with Battleship, Sunk, tableau game
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  Design technique for Tableau dashboards: semi-transparent images

  Posted on April 13, 2017 by Joshua Milligan in All, Dashboards, DataViz, Fun, Pushing the Limits, Storytelling & Commentary, Tips and Tricks.

  Wow! I’m still stunned to have won the first IronViz feeder contest for 2017! And excited! And humbled. And honored.  Wow!  Thank you to everyone who has had kind words of encouragement! You can read some broad description of my entry here: The Changing Shape of History: From the Colonies to the United States.  In […]

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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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  Bob Ross Mashup: The Joy of Viz Painting 2

  Posted on June 28, 2016 by Joshua Milligan in All, Dashboards, DataViz, Fun, Pushing the Limits, Storytelling & Commentary.

  I grew up watching Bob Ross and as I watched him mix colors and beat brushes, I knew that I could be an artist. He had such an optimism, excitement, and passion.  And he knew that he could inspire others to have the same. Now, most often, my paint is data and my canvas and brush […]

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  What’s New? Webinars, Tableau 10, second edition of Learning Tableau, and more!

  Posted on June 13, 2016 by Joshua Milligan in All, Fun, New Features, Storytelling & Commentary.

  Summer has come in Texas!  School is out. Tableau 10 beta testing is going full steam ahead and the new features are amazing! So what have I been up to recently? First, prepping to present a new webinar: Tableau 10 Preview!  You can participate live June 28th at noon (CDT).  You can watch a recording […]

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  Upcoming Webinar: The Fun and Serious Sides of Data Visualization

  Posted on March 11, 2016 by Joshua Milligan in All, Dashboards, DataViz, Fun, Storytelling & Commentary.

  On March 24, at noon CDT, I’ll be presenting a webinar that looks at the fun and serious sides of data visualization.  You may have seen some of the games I’ve created in Tableau – so you know I like to have fun! But dashboards and data visualization can have a serious side too – and both the […]

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  Book your Star Wars Vacation with Tableau

  Posted on December 15, 2015 by Joshua Milligan in All, Fun.

  A long time ago in a galaxy far far away   Wow! Star Wars and Tableau.  You can’t get much more geeky than that.  So when I saw that Tableau had created a Web Data Connector for Star Wars and encouraged everyone to build a #StarWarsData viz, I knew I would be up all night […]

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  The Assignment that Made Me Fall in Love

  Posted on December 13, 2015 by Joshua Milligan in All, Calculations, Fun, Storytelling & Commentary.

  The Assignment When I was in junior high, my math teacher, Mrs. White gave the class an amazing assignment.  She gave everyone an overhead transparency (remember those?) with three points drawn on it — labeled 1, 2, and 3.  They were the corners of an equilateral triangle. Then she gave the following instructions: Draw a […]

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  Games In Tableau – Pushing the Limits with Practical Results

  Posted on October 21, 2015 by Joshua Milligan in All, Fun, Pushing the Limits, Storytelling & Commentary, Tips and Tricks.

  You may not think of Tableau as a game engine, but I’ve used it to create interactive games (such as tic-tac-toe, Star Trek, and Choose Your Own Adventure) that push the limits of what is possible while learning some very practical lessons. In my #Data15 presentation: #GamesInTableau, I demonstrated numerous practical tips, tricks, and principles of […]

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