April
10
2009
Back in January, I published a post on how to create a calendar-based view in Tableau. At the time, I mentioned that it had created some buzz within the halls at Tableau-central and that, in part, lead to an invitation from Christian Chabot, CEO, to participate in a new project they were working on.
Well, here is your first peek at that project – Tableau Online!
Essentially, it will allow anyone with Tableau Desktop to publish their workbook online and embed the visualization in their website.
Tableau Online is currently in private beta, but you can sign up for updates here, or click on the logo below the visualization.
Before we get to the visualization itself, here’s what I’ve learned about the project from Christian and Ellie Fields – Director of Product Marketing.
Christian says that the vision for Tableau Online is for it to be “the YouTube of information visualization…” which I interpret as the platform of choice for publishing rich, interactive visualizations online.
Additionally, during a recent discussion with Ellie Fields, I uncovered some of the more nitty-gritty details…
- It currently only works with local data – basically you need an extract from any source locally on your machine in order to use the visualization with Tableau Online (in all likelihood you will upload a packaged workbook)
- There have been discussions around an API so that data might be transmitted ‘over-the-wire’, but there are no specific plans for getting that done
- This is a very early look, the hardware is still undergoing performance testing so be patient if you get an error with the visualization or it takes a while to load; and hey, leave a comment describing what happened!
What follows is a proof of concept based on the calendar view I had developed.
This calendar specifically, and Tableau Online generally is built on the new version 5 platform (there have been some examples creeping out on the Tableau blog). I’ve been working with the version 5 beta so let me tell you about the features from 5 that are important here. Sheetlinks and highlights have been repackaged – and improved – to a new function called ‘Actions’. In this visualization, the calendar filter for year is also applied to the small multiples sparklines below the calendar. This is now very easy to do compared to how sheet links work in version 4. Also, if you click on any particular day within the calendar, that date is highlighted on the small multiples below – enabling this is as easy as hitting a switch (which is basically what you do).
Many improvements and new options have been added to quick filters – but, so far, the biggest improvement IMHO is the addition of the search feature! (Although I wish that the Tableau team had built in direct feedback for when a search fails)
Here are some of the things you can do in this proof of concept.
- Filter on Year for the whole visualization
- Select a particular month for the calendar view
- Highlight any given day in both the calendar and the small multiples by selecting a day in the calendar (you can also select multiple days)
- Highlight a day in the small multiples only by clicking on a plotted point (or drag select multiple days)
- Highlight a particular month by selecting the month name in the small multiples column header
- Lowlight inactive days in the calendar for a particular product category by selecting the category name in the small multiples row header (you can select multiple categories by selecting one category and then either SHIFT or CTRL clicking another category)
The Tableau team and I have discussed many changes to this visualization, but we weren’t able to get them done in time for this post as each change currently requires extensive testing on the new platform, but those changes should be coming soon. Discussed changes include changing the color encoding to profit instead of total sales, and doing a daily sparkline only for the currently selected month and then bar charts aggregated by month for the rest of the months in the currently selected year.
What else would you change/remove/add to this visualization?
Finally, there will be a smattering of sneak peeks going up across the infoviz community so keep your eye on out here and the Tableau blog as those new visualizations go up!
Tags: information-visualization, infoviz, sneakpeek, tableau-online, tableau-software
It would be great if there was a way to download the Packaged Workbook (.twbx) and source data. Then allow for derivatives, different visualizations of the same source, or if multiple data sources were used to create one visualization. Maybe something like Aviary has done, http://aviary.com/artists/meowza/images/colorme#derivatives is a good example of browsing images created from one source image, some of the derivatives use additional sources and have multiple versions.
As far as an addition to your embedded calendar, I would like to select a mark on the sparkline and have the above calendar change to that month and select the day. Also I think it would be nice to have a legend for what the S/P/M mean. From the on hover tool-tip, I was able to see that the S means sum of sales, and P means sum of profit, but how am I supposed to know what M means?
When I select a date in the calendar, what additional insight does highlighting that day’s three marks in the sparkline tell me? I would think there would be a better way to display the breakdown of where the values (S/P/M) came from. If you can make the .twbx available, I’ll see what I can come up with.
Overall, I am very excited that Tableau will offer hosting for customer generated visualizations. The first place I would want to use this would be on their forums (http://www.tableausoftware.com/community/forums). It will be interesting to see the response/lag with larger data sets.
Joe, democratization of the data/visualization is a big idea behind this effort so your idea is well taken (by me at least). It would definitely be nice if these had an option to be released under a creative commons license so that others could build derivatives.
Agreed on the legend, I’ll see if I can get that into the next build (BTW, M = %Margin).
As far as the highlights on the sparklines go (when selecting a day in the calendar) it points out whether there were sales for that category on that day and more obviously (and maybe less important) the specific value of sales in that category on that day.
As stated in the post, this workbook is built on the upcoming version 5 so you would first need to be part of the beta to play with it. Also, I’m not sure if I can share this particular file (I’ll get clarification from Tableau). However, it’s built on the SuperStore sample data so it’s not like you couldn’t recreate it with minimal effort
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And yeah, it sure would be nice if selecting a point within the sparklines changed the calendar. I’ll have to see if that’s possible (guess where my day off is going now?)
I hadn’t thought about that way but you’re right this will be invaluable in the forums!
Cheers!
Clint,
This IS the vision. Some many possibilities.
Would it be difficult to add the additional conditional color functionality that I demonstrated in this comment Ellie’s original blog post on the calendar?
Mike, probably not, I hadn’t had a chance to play around with your modification so I guess I’ll have to give it a try. The trick at the moment is that any mods to the visualization have to undergo extensive testing to ensure the stability of the platform. So, while I am sure your suggestion is easy enough to implement in the workbook, it may be to intensive on the server.
In any case, I’ll test it out in a workbook and then talk to Ellie, et. al. about adding it to the Online version.
Thanks!
I just did some more poking around, and saw something that looked strange (I am sure there is a reasonable explanation).
Select the day October 24, 2007, and the “S” value (Sum of Sales) is 7131.23. Then when I hover over the 3 dots in the sparkline, I get 2238, 5857, and 1995. interestingly this totals to 10090. very different numbers, is there some type of filter applied to the calendar sheet but not to the sparkline? Or am I comparing apples to oranges?
Also, try selecting the day October 25, 2007, the value zero is not charted for the Furniture row.
Joe, something very funky going on there – the values that I see for Oct
2724, 2007 are not the ones that you mention and they also don’t match up!ahh, it seems that the data may not always refresh correctly. I reselected 2007 and Oct 24 and got the same #s as you.
Thanks for all the comments on the viz. Glad you like it. As Clint said we may do a refresh of this data later on, and add some of the feature suggestions. We’ll also keep publishing on our own blog with some larger and larger data sets. We’re also looking into the refresh issues that Joe found. And Clint, thanks for being in the beta!
Nice work. I just discovered this post via Twitter. The calendar visualization is something I think many folks will relate to week. Nice use of the line chart below to show the larger context of trend. Very well done.
Joe,
Your comment offers some great suggestions. Some other thoughts:
1. Might be nice if selecting a month header in the small-multiples view, changes the month in the calendar view?
2. If you hover over a month label in the small-multiples view, you can see the date level +/- control in the upper left corner. Right now you can click this control. What happens next is unclear.
I just took a look at this page on a computer with a smaller screen (1024×768) and the data viz it cut off. It may be useful to offer a link to open the viz full-screen, or maybe scroll bars for a really wide data viz.
What’s the difference then between Tableau Server and Tableau Online?
Alig, I don’t know specifically, but I’m guessing that it’s a couple of things.
1. Scale
2. Ability to embed visualizations across the web
Joe,
unfortunately, the TBO visualization is not liquid (e.g. fixed width & height) so there’s not a great solution here. On the plus side, less than 20% of visits to my site are 1024 or less.
Michael,
When you click on the plus sign next to the months, the columns are expanded to days (same as would happen in Desktop).