Tableau, you sunk my Battleship!
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 in the next few weeks to demonstrate how I made it. Everything from generating the data set to some of the techniques considered and then actually used, to a future idea of turning this into a community game using a little known feature of Tableau Public.
But for now, let’s just have fun! Just click the image here:
Joshua Milligan is a five-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.
Really awesome stuff Josh!
Thank you!
Holy crap! This is mindblowing! Really good work.
Thank you Daniel!
Hi Joshua,
I am interested in building out a form of this dashboard in a player vs player format and your viz is the only battleship viz I can find on the internet for Tableau. I would love to know more about the inter workings of this dashboard so that I can try my hand at building it.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Hi Jake!
You should be able to download it from Tableau Public and start to dig into the details. If you have any specific questions as you go, let me know!
Thanks for your quick response.
I am curious how the selection process works on the upper left of the visualization? That might be a basic Tableau question, but I have not seen a diagram that looks like that on a dashboard and it is not a sheet in the document for me to look at.
Additionally, do you have a data source connected?
Disregard my above questions(I figured those items out). I am now down to one last question and after that I think I have it figured out.
My two boards, after changing parameters, changes the squares colors correctly to miss or hit, but those squares in particular are nearly out of view for some reason. The rest of the “unknown” squares stay uniform and look correct. Did you run into this issue, do you have an idea of how to fix this?
Hi Jake,
Here’s my guess, the size of the square mark may be “too large” and expand outside the visible area. Try adding an ad-hoc calculation to Rows and Columns after all other dimensions – just a blank string “” will do and see if that constrains the marks to the right space.
If that doesn’t work, let me know and we can see what else is going on.
-Joshua