While working on my tableau dashboard for Viz Games Singapore 2019, I thought I should write a review for Tableau after creating several dashboards in Tableau. My submission for Viz Games Singapore 2019 is regarding the National University of Singapore (NUS), which we can trace back its roots to Singapore’s first higher learning institution established in 1905. For those who are interested in my submission for Viz Games Singapore 2019, you may visit this link.
Ready-made charts in Tableau
Tip: Click on “Show Me” button or Ctrl + 1 on Tableau Desktop to see the possible charts
The charts are analogous to ready-made salad bowls: Quick to create and customizable.
Tableau provides a great variety of color palettes, some of which have already been ingrained in our culture. For instance, we have been long accustomed to the “traffic light palette” — red, yellow and green to demonstrate different levels of KPIs.
Another underrated aspect of Tableau would be their Tooltip
Rather than using chart labels, users can utilize tooltips to tuck any additional information neatly within the tooltips. This will allow the dashboard to become neater and more pleasing for users to view.
Customizations for Dashboards
Use icons for charts
Instead of using boring circles and rectangles, we can replace the points with unique shapes. (Guess which gender distribution chart belongs to faculty of arts and social sciences and which belongs to faculty of engineering?)
Navigation buttons
Back in 2018 when I first explored Tableau during my internship with GIC, I had to create my own button using tricks provided by the forum. After the new update, there is a nice button that you can select and customize to navigate to different dashboards
Top 3 charts
I am skipping the conventional charts (E.g. Line and bar charts) for this review.
My favorite has always been the donut chart. I have always been rather bored with excel’s pie chart and having the donut chart is an interesting switch.
Other than donut charts, I use treemaps as a change to showcase the difference between each figure.
Another chart that you can generate using Tableau would be word cloud. But using the word cloud might not be always suitable for your data.
Top 5 Tableau Creators
I draw inspirations from multiple sources so I have selected my top 5 sources for visualization inspirations. Some of them are Tableau Zen Masters and located in various parts of the world.
Ryan Sleeper: https://public.tableau.com/profile/osmguy#!/
Ken Flerlage: https://public.tableau.com/profile/ken.flerlage#!/
Kevin Flerlage: https://public.tableau.com/profile/kevin.flerlage#!/
Simon Beaumont: https://public.tableau.com/profile/simon.beaumont#!/
LA NACIÓN: https://public.tableau.com/profile/lanacion.com#!/
Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn if you have any questions.
