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The Learning Center is the place where will always find in-depth, actionable content.

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Refreshing Real-Time Data in Tableau: Adding a Dashboard Button for Dynamic Data Updates

Learn how to refresh real-time data in Tableau and add a custom dashboard button for dynamic updates in this post. Discover the benefits of refreshing data, how Tableau’s caching mechanism works, and how to create a mock chart button and add actions to the dashboard to update the data on demand. Improving the accuracy of your data, increasing efficiency, and enhancing the user experience are just a few of the advantages that come with refreshing your data in real-time.

Use case examples for Pandas profiling in real-world data analysis projects

Pandas is an open-source data manipulation and analysis library for Python. It provides a wide range of tools and functions for handling and processing data, making it an essential tool for any data analyst, scientist, or engineer. Pandas provides a fast and efficient way to work with structured data, including reading from and writing to […]

How I built my own Stock Watchlist Dashboard in Tableau via Google Sheets

Are you into investing? Or maybe curious about how a part of the stock market is doing? An interactive stock dashboard might be the ideal project for you. Tableau is a data visualization software that allows you to make interactive charts, graphs, and dashboards using data from all kinds of sources.It allows you to mix, […]

An Inventory Dashboard in Tableau inspired by … pizza

I’ve been playing with AIs lately to generate images of dashboards. I know, fun. Right? While I don’t think that these tools will take over our jobs like I scared my friend Ludovic here, I do believe they are spectacular in a way that they can help with inspiration. Business dashboards are sometimes dull, and […]

Streamlit for execs: How to drive growth with real-time data analysis

Hello and welcome back to Canonicalized! In this post we will discuss how Streamlit can be used by top-level executives to identify and capitalize on new growth opportunities, and how this can help them increase revenue, market share, and customer satisfaction. We will also cover why Streamlit is useful for this purpose, and what pain […]

What is Apache Airflow? Best Practices for Data Orchestration and Automation

Apache Airflow is an open-source platform for programmatically authoring, scheduling, and monitoring workflows. It is often used to schedule and run data pipelines, but can be used for any type of workflow. Airflow allows users to define and organize tasks using Python code, and then schedule and monitor those tasks using a web interface. It […]

Self-Service Analytics: Benefits, Impact and Adoption

Self-service analytics is a powerful tool for businesses to improve their data-driven decision making. It provides easy access to data and analysis tools for non-technical employees, without the need for IT or data analysts. In this article, we will explore the advantages of self-service analytics, its impact on decision making, and real-life examples of its […]

Data Mesh: The Key to Unlocking a Scalable and Resilient Data Future

In today’s digital landscape, businesses are constantly looking for ways to organize and manage data in large, complex systems. One solution that is becoming increasingly popular is Data Mesh. It’s a way to organize and manage data in a way that is scalable, resilient, and easy to understand. In this blog post, we will provide a […]

Tableau and Alteryx for Business Intelligence: How to Use the Tools to Make Data-Driven Decisions

Business intelligence (BI) is the process of gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help organizations make better business decisions. In today’s data-driven world, having the ability to make informed decisions based on accurate, up-to-date information is crucial for success. This is where Tableau and Alteryx come in. The synergy of Tableau and […]

Maximizing the benefits of dbt in your data pipeline

Welcome to Canonicalized! In this blog post, we’ll be discussing how to maximize the benefits of dbt (data build tool) in your data pipeline. If you’re not familiar with dbt, it’s a framework that helps data analysts and engineers transform and load data into their data warehouse. It was developed by Fishtown Analytics and has […]

Call Center Dashboard in Tableau

I love dashboards! I love looking at them, I love using them, and I love building them. There’s something special about looking at visually represented numbers. If I would have to pick one thing to do every day that brings me joy, building dashboards would be at the very top. But I take it as […]

What to do when you get stuck in Tableau!?

As a person who uses Tableau 95% of the time, I have to say it: I get stuck. A lot!
And I’m not ashamed of it.

I believe it’s normal to run into problems when you’re trying to improve.

Here are some thoughts that I hope will help you as well as myself in troubled times.

Financial Analytics in Tableau: Viz Finance with Dorian

I am proud to announce the launch of Financial DataViz, a collection of data visualizations targeted towards the finance industry, created by Dorian Banutoiu. This project is an effort to delve deeper into the topic of finance and bring forth valuable insights through data visualization. To achieve this goal, I will be exploring various topics, […]

Tableau Case Study: Chaoly unleashes Chinese Social & eCommerce Analytics

A look behind the scenes at how we helped Chaoly use Tableau to bring data to life.

Juicy details about goals, challenges, and factors that have contributed to success.

We share the full list of dashboards that reached the clients’ screens.

Dealing with common Scatter Plot issues in Tableau

I have the bad habit of revisiting things I’ve built with a critical eye. What I love about Tableau Public is that we can let visualizations fly and observe how people react to them. The key thing for me is perspective. The ability to not take feedback personally is essential! I believe we should try […]

Filter ranges in Tableau with Parameter Action Intervals

Say what? What I am trying to achieve is quite simple: offer the ability to filter a range using parameters, make it easy to use and give it a clean look. Before parameter actions (pre Tableau 2019.2) we would do something along the lines of: The obvious problem with this approach is that the start […]

Customer Demographics: Using Data Visualization for Business Understanding [Visual Analysis Series]

“Know your customer!” This might be the most common business advice out there. We read about it on blogs, social media, we see it in presentations, we hear it from experts. I’m not too fond of this advice. It makes me cringe when I hear it. Mainly because it leads to ambiguous questions like “how?” […]

Evolution and Variation with “line & slope” charts in Tableau

Love line charts? Love slope charts? Why not put them together? In this article, I am going to show you why this is not always a good idea and some good use cases of how they could work well. People think computers will keep them from making mistakes. They’re wrong. With computers you make mistakes […]

9+ reasons on why Tableau is extraordinary

The first time I had the chance to test the tool, I didn’t see it. Fast forward to the present, and I am using Tableau every day. I can’t imagine life without it!

I decided to expand on the reasons I believe this software is extraordinary. I hope this article will help some of you avoid making the same mistake I did.

Parameter Actions and Toggle Containers – New levels of interactivity in Tableau 2019.2

Tableau is making progress towards better interactivity.

After the introduction of Set Actions in 2018, they are taking it up a notch with Parameter Actions and with the ability to show/hide dashboard containers (toggle).

In this article, we are showing how these work and we share some ideas on how you can make use of them.

Visual Analysis Series: SEO Growth or Business Decline? eCommerce Edition

Data visualization is a powerful tool in the hands of those who try to answer the right question. For some it might be pretty pictures, others might build charts for the sake of it. For us, it’s something that should move minds in the right direction. We decided to show how we use data visualization […]

Why I love MakeoverMonday

I wrote this on my phone one night after my 4th makeover. I didn’t work up the courage to publish it at the time, but I am going to do it now (~9 months later). For those who don’t know me, my name is Dorian, and I discovered MakeoverMonday about 10 months ago. I got […]

Google Analytics, Python, Pandas, Plotly: Get Started

In this article, we discuss how we can use Plolty with Google Analytics data. For this we need the following: a Google Analytics account from which we pull the data through Google Analytics API V4; Python, which is going to be our programming language; to process the data we use Pandas; the best library for […]

Cohort Analysis: How to Study Cohorts for Actionable Insights

Why are cohorts useful from a business perspective?

How to perform a cohort analysis in a meaningful way?

What types of data visualization work well?

How to gain cutting-edge insights from studying user behavior?

What is the Google Analytics User Explorer Report and Ways to Use it

As a beginner with Google Analytics, I sometimes find it difficult to check all the data on all levels, purposefully. When I am in this process, User Explorer is my favorite feature. Here’s what brought me to say that. Google Analytics is an excellent way of checking website traffic. User Explorer is a report where […]

Interactive Highlight Tables/Heatmaps with Tableau Set Actions & Transparent Sheets

In this article, I am going to pick apart and try to improve on a prevalent chart type used to analyze cohort retention: the impact plot (also called triangle chart). It is basically a highlight table, or a heat map with the numbers displayed. Here are a couple of examples: This graph type that is […]

Connected Cycle Plots in Tableau with Set Actions

Cycle plots offer a lot of insight and are easy to build in Tableau.

With the approach from this article, we are trying to include one more.

By connecting the dots of a specific time point, we can follow the overall evolution across cycles.

Improved Stacked Bar Charts with Tableau Set Actions

Stacked bar charts are difficult to interpret more often than not.

One thing we can do is to use percentages instead of the actual values. Comparing the top and bottom segments becomes easier, but we lose track of the totals, and we still have difficulties with the middle parts.

To focus on one category at a time while keeping the others in sight, I implemented an interactive component to move the part of the bars we’re interested in at the bottom.

StreamGraphs in Tableau via R

Also called theme rivers and in some cases steam graphs. It all started with this viz by Alex Jones: From the moment I saw it, I knew I wanted to create one by myself. Fortunately, Alex offered some insights on how he did it, but he didn’t give up the whole thing. Reverse engineering is […]

Tableau: a dot plot and a “stacked” bar chart in the same view

… or concurrent lollipops and dumbbells chart. For this week’s MakeoverMonday we looked at women representation in the House of Representatives (no pun intended). I came up with a population pyramid style chart. I put Democrats versus Republicans, where we would typically have men and women diverging to the left and right. So here’s the […]