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So you want a job as a Tableau developer?

Eva Murray1 Comment

Whether you check articles from 2013 and 2014 or from last year or even last month, you will notice that Tableau skills are highly sought after in the Tech market and across industries as more and more organisations focus on analytics to drive business improvement and growth.

There is a lot of demand for people with analytical and ‘data wrangling’ skills, but as Tableau’s customer base grows even further, there will be many more organisations looking for people who can squeeze more insights out of their data with the help of Tableau.

If you’re an experienced Analyst with Tableau skills on your LinkedIn profile, you have probably been contacted by recruiters, because the supply of these skills in the market doesn’t seem to satisfy the demand yet (please note: all these assumptions are based on my own observations, there is no study I have commissioned to back this up; these views are my own).

Personally, I’ve also had people contact me as they look for roles as ‘Tableau Developers’ in organisations like EXASOL, and in places I worked previously. This made me think that maybe it’s a good time to share my perspective on how you can increase your chances of landing a really cool ‘Tableau job’ somewhere.

The prerequisites

The ‘Tableau jobs’ I have come across, done myself and seen from the outside require you to have a bunch of skills and characteristics. Of course there are various generalizations coming up here, but remember, this is from my point of you and it’s what I think works…

Tableau

Yes, you’ll need to know how to use Tableau and use it effectively to distill insights from data, tell data stories, visualise what is going on in an organisation and communicate that effectively to your stakeholders. So make sure you have the technical skills that mean you can use the software well.
The following list has a number of suggestions. I think they’re all valuable but of course you can’t do them all right now and all at once. Pick those that resonate with you and revisit the list at your leisure…

What can you do to get better at using Tableau?

  1. Use it every day. Every person can download the Tableau Public app for free and use it to visualize data whenever and wherever they please. This is a great way to practice, practice, practice.
    If you have access to Tableau Desktop then of course, use it and use it often.
    There is a sample dataset (Superstore Sales) you can practice with and you can find datasets online to visualize.
    Or you can let others do the finding for you and join…
  2. #MakeoverMonday. This social data project was started by Andy Kriebel as his own way to practice Tableau. In 2016 he was joined by Andy Cotgreave and they turned it into a challenge for the Tableau community (other tools are welcome, too). In 2017 I took Andy Cotgreave’s spot and now run MakeoverMonday with Andy K to bring you a fresh dataset to visualise every week as well as an article and/or viz that you can ‘makeover’ and improve on. The community is very active on Twitter and you will find support, feedback and lots of inspiration every week.
  3. If you’re keen to step it up and work your way through some more advanced dataviz challenges, join #WorkoutWednesday where you are given a viz to recreate every week. You do this based on the image you see, which will not be easy, I can tell you that much, but it’s a great way to learn how you can use Tableau to visualize data in ways you hadn’t tried before.
  4. Viz together. Meet others in your organisation or through places like Meetup.com where you can find Tableau User Groups. By getting together and working through viz challenges, asking questions and meeting like-minded people (maybe over beer and pizza?), you not only learn from others and enhance your own skills, but more importantly, you can grow your ‘Tableau network’, find out what fellow Tableau enthusiasts are doing, hear about job opportunities, learn what makes people successful in their roles and above all have a great time with people who geek out over the same stuff as you.
  5. Attend formal Tableau training. Of course! The reason why I don’t list this first is because there are so many (free) ways you can improve your skills and they are easy to start, have little to no entry hurdles and are opportunities to get better right now. Attending a formal training course is an excellent way to learn how to use the tool most effectively and efficiently. You will find out about the many different approaches you can take to solve a dataviz problem and you will learn from accredited trainers who have gone through a thorough process to ensure what they teach you is top level stuff.
    Maybe your organisation sends you on a course or, if there is a big enough group internally, they have a trainer come in-house who can provide training specifically for you and your colleagues.
    No matter what, if you have the opportunity to go on a training course, DO IT.
    My personal recommendation: use Tableau as much as possible leading up to the course. That way you can focus on the many tips from the trainer on the day, rather than still figuring out which buttons to click.
  6. Get certified. Tableau offers formal certification exams that help you demonstrate your skill level. Once you’ve used Tableau for a while, set yourself a goal of completing the QA exam to test your knowledge. You can put your certification on your CV and LinkedIn profile afterwards
  7. Teach others. The best way to understand how much (already) know is to explain something to others. As you grow your own skills, make an effort to help others as well. By teaching them you can quickly see what you know and what you don’t and you can get feedback from your ‘students’ on your ability to explain analytics concepts, using the software, complex calculations and dataviz design.
  8. Present your work. Sounds like an odd point to include in this list? I don’t think so. It is immensely valuable to be able to demonstrate your analysis and findings to others. In your job you may have to explain stuff on a whiteboard or show some PowerPoint slides to your team or management. Demo-ing Tableau is a worthwhile skill to acquire, because you’re not just showing static images, but data visualizations in the software, a toolbox for asking questions and finding answers. And that requires certain presentation skills.
    Demo-ing software is different from sitting next to each other in front of a screen. When you present (in) Tableau to others, you need to be very precise and deliberate in all your mouse actions, your word choice and slow things down for the audience to ensure they can follow what you’re showing on screen.
    Practicing this will help you find the shortest path to your solution, the minimal amount of clicks. It will also, once again, ensure you’re able to explain yourself well which in turn shows you how well you’ve understood a concept yourself.

 

Other technical skills

So you’re proficient with Tableau, but what other skills are useful to have to land that Tableau job you’re looking for?

Technical skills that will come in handy certainly include but aren’t limited to

  • being able to work with databases,
  • having a good understanding of statistics and how to treat data,
  • and knowing how to ‘wrangle data’. And by that I mean getting data from various sources, transforming, enhancing, enriching it and bringing it together into a form that you can then work with in Tableau.

Various tools exist for these components of the job and what you use will largely depend on what’s available in your workplace.

What I think is more important still are your…

Soft skills and attitude

These are difficult/impossible to quantify but they are hugely important for the success of your Tableau career.
If you want to focus on landing that first analyst gig, then certainly focus on developing your technical skills, but for the long-term you need more than being able to build slick dashhboards.

The standard skills around teamwork and communication still apply, but I think in a Tableau context they can look a little different and here are my thoughts on how you can be more effective as a Tableau analyst or developer:

  • Communicate clearly and concisely. This is not about short emails or water cooler discussions. It’s about using your data visualizations and dashboards as an effective means to share information and insights.
    Continuously look at your work and re-evaluate whether you have used the canvas to your full advantage. Are your chart titles clear? Have you guided the viewer through your analysis? Are colours, shapes and other objects used well and easy to understand? Does the colour scheme carry through your work?
    Have you removed everything that isn’t necessary? Do you really need the logo for an internal report or could you put something more important in its place?
    Is your dashboard clean and neat? Is the font easy to read? Does every chart need a box around it? And have you considered moving on from the old fashion standard BI report layout of 2×2 charts on each dashboard?
  • Divide and conquer – work together. Most organisations require you to be a team player, at least some of the time. Yes, you’ll need to be able to work on your own and develop data visualizations that come together in reports to be shared. But along the way you will most likely work with a number of people inside and outside your team to get access to the relevant data, systems and resources. You will also have to gain a good understanding for different areas of your organisation as you work with subject matter experts to improve the analysis of the performance of your business.
    Some examples I think of when it comes to teamwork in a Tableau context are:

    • working with the team responsible for the data: tell them precisely what you need and make their lives easier by mocking up views with the relevant fields; tell them what you’re trying to achieve; be specific about timeframes; ensure you understand prioritisation processes in your organisation and be aware of other competing projects.
      Is there a way you can do the work yourself? Is there a self-service model you can utilise?
    • working with the business users who will eventually use and consume your Tableau dashboards: what are they trying to do with the information? What have they been using so far? What is their biggest pain?
      As you work on creating dashboards for them, involve them in the process, iterate and show them where you’re heading. Be clear about technical limitations and best practice; you’re the Tableau expert so guide them on what can be done and what should be done. Do they really need 20 drop-down filters on each page? Probably not – find a better solution for them.
      They are your customers, address their needs and their current pain points, but guide them along the way to ensure that the solution will be sustainable and will serve their purpose
    • working with your own team: share your knowledge and help others succeed. No one likes a selfish person and by helping others you will always become a better team member yourself. Acknowledge others for the work they have put in and recognise their skills and talents. Every person can contribute to the team’s skills and expertise, so ensure there is a way for sharing on a regular basis. You’ll grow as individuals and as a team
    • working with the Tableau community: give back, share your knowledge, publish your work and help others. You found a cool way to visualize data and no one else has done it before? Great if you can patent it and make money from it. But better still: tell others about it, blog about it, make a video, share screenshots, upload your work and help others do what you do.
      You might be surprised and with the collective intelligence of the community you can improve your work even further.
      Let us see what you’ve done, we all love seeing a great viz, learning new tricks and trying new ways of communicating with data.
  • Be organised and plan your work. Most of us are required to adhere to a time schedule for work and come up with some sort of plan for the tasks we do.
    The same applies for data visualization and communicating with data.
    Whether you start by looking at the raw data when a dataset is completely new to you or you first talk to people about the subject, I recommend you test different approaches and find one that works for you.

    What I like to do for Makeover Monday is:

    • look at the fields in the dataset to get an idea of what type of data I’m dealing with
    • read background materials if available
    • do a quick analysis in Tableau to get a better understanding of the data: how many records are in the dataset? How do the measures trend over time? Are there a lot of missing values? What members do my dimensions have? Are there any peculiarities? Where are the outliers?
    • go back to pen and paper and sketch out some ideas of how I can visualize the data
    • work in Tableau to create the vizzes I sketched initially
  • Manage your own progress. YOU are responsible for your success and your career. YOU are the person showing up at work in the morning and if YOU don’t do a certain task then it doesn’t get done.
    It may be easiest to ask your manager what to do and expect them to move you forward on the career path, but that’s not going to happen. YOU have to make it happen. Be hungry for progress, be eager to learn, be happy to help and see feedback as an opportunity to continuously improve and get better

 

Aside from developing and growing your hard and soft skills, there is one more tip I want to share with you. It is equally important. At least. This tip can be understood as ‘growing your personal brand’, ‘gaining visibility’ or ‘being known for something’, but I just want to call it

 

Put yourself out there

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

how about:

If you build stunning Tableau visualizations and no one sees them, do they have an impact on the dataviz community?

 

Just like people group around other topics, like cars, model trains, marathon running and comic book action heroes, the Tableau community loves seeing what people create in the tool and what they do with it. Sharing your work on a blog, Twitter, Reddit, etc. will not only help you get better (because you’ll polish it before you publish and you’ll get feedback from others that can help you improve), but it will help you grow your own profile in the Tableau community.

Over time you will get noticed for your vizzes, your creativity, your technical expertise, your excellent writing, your story telling skills or your constructive feedback for others, or a combination of the above.

Remember, you’re still reading this far because you’re interested in a Tableau career, or at least making Tableau the focus of your next job. The community is an integral part of this and can help you get there.

The Tableau community is also what clearly differentiates Tableau from its competitors, so make use of it as much as you can.
Found a cool project or initiative and want to get involved? Ask the organisers whether they could do with an extra pair of hands.
Want to share your knowledge of LOD calculations? Get busy on the forums and answer people’s questions.

 

Tableau Public

Tableau Public is one of the key tools you want to use to support all of the above. Why? Because Tableau Public is THE platform for sharing your work and growing your own portfolio. You can publish all your vizzes (they will be public, so don’t publish work stuff – just recreate the design of your work dashboards with superstore data or other public datasets before publishing) and showcase your skills.

Over time your vizzes will reflect how your skills are growing. Embarrassed by your first two dashboards? Don’t worry. Don’t delete them. DON’T DELETE THEM. You’ve shown progress, that’s what matters, and by keeping your first vizzes up there people can see how far you’ve come.

 

So after all of this, how do you land that Tableau job?

You’ll have to meet people. It will be hard to hear about Tableau job opportunities unless you talk to the right people.

Where can you find them? Most certainly at the annual Tableau Conference, but of course also at Tableau Conferences on Tour, your local user groups and other tech/data events.

My recommendation is to first work on building your skills and dataviz portfolio as well as growing your profile. It’s not about self-promotion, it’s about ensuring your work is visible. You’re not planning to move up a level on the factory floor in a manufacturing business.
We’re talking about an industry that is global, where most communication and interaction happens virtually and where people are geographically dispersed, so the only way for someone to notice you is if you have an online presence (Tableau Public Profile, Blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.).

These things can happen in parallel, you just have to start.

Then it’s about meeting people, connecting with them and starting conversations. Ask questions. And don’t just ask for a job.
Find out what organisations need, what they’re doing with their data and what their challenges are. What can you offer them? What value can you add?
Once you have figure that out, you can move the discussion to opportunities, but unless you have something of value to offer, chances will be rather slim.

Continue.

Grow your network, grow your skills, listen more than you talk, help others and share your work.

Be so good they can’t ignore you

When you focus on giving and on turning yourself into the best Tableau analyst/vizkid/developer/design guru you can be, then the opportunities will come your way. You won’t have to hunt for them, you won’t have to cold-call or write generic messages and job applications online.

So go out there, get exceptionally good at what you do and see where it takes you.

And once you get there, let me know, I’d love to hear your story!

 

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How to add short hyperlinks to your Tableau workbook

Eva Murray3 Comments

Here is a quick tip for everyone who uses hyperlinks in their Tableau workbooks but wants them to be short and neat. This may especially be useful for the #MakeoverMonday community as we ask people to state the data source information on their published vizzes and we always provide a link to the data source on our website.

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There are a couple of options for including hyperlinks and taking the viewer to the relevant website.

  1. Add a text box to your viz and paste the full hyperlink into itfull-link
  2. Add a calculated field containing the relevant text you want to display in a worksheet, then add the worksheet to your viz/dashboard and add a URL actiontext-link
  3. Use a transparent image and float it on top of the text, image or area of your viz that you want to link, then add a URL action to the transparent image

 

For the purpose of this blog, I will explain option 2, because I think it will be most useful for people.

How to do it

  • create a new calculated field which contains the text you want to display. For this example, I will use my Twitter handle @TriMyData
  • drag your newly created dimension onto a new worksheet as Text
  • format the text so it will be easily recognised as a hyperlink: font colour #0000EE, underline
  • add the worksheet to your dashboard (e.g. at the bottom as a footer)
  • remove tooltip and command buttons from the worksheet
  • add a URL action using the relevant hyperlink
  • Done!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

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Makeover Monday – Week 8, 2017: The European Potato Industry

Eva Murray1 Comment

Time for a European dataset once again. And if you’ve ever been around me eat breakfast, lunch or dinner time, you’ll know that I simply LOVE to eat. Potatoes feature right at the top of my list of all-time favourite vegetables. But in recent times people have shunned the humble potato for fear it will make fat (what???). So to ensure potatoes get a bit of love (it was Valentine’s Day only last week after all), this week is all about potatoes…

The original ‘viz’ comes from a Eurostat report, which contains a bunch of tables, pie charts and line charts. Our focus in particular is on these two beauties:

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What I like about them:

  • they’re simple and everyone would know how to read them, looking at the intersection of the rows and columns to understand each value in its appropriate context
  • countries are listed in alphabetical order, which makes it easy to find specific ones the reader may be looking for
  • equally, years (in table 1) are in chronological order
  • having years on columns (table 1) makes sense for reading tables, rather than stacking them in a single column
  • The report clearly states all the data sources and provides links to them

What I don’t like about them:

  • no interactivity, tables don’t appeal to me visually, they don’t draw my attention and don’t make me want to look at this further
  • by shading each cell according to the value, this could have been easily turned into a highlight table which would be better than the uninspiring black and white data sheet
  • it’s very hard to compare countries over time and across metrics as I have to keep values in memory (i.e. in my brain) while searching for those values I want to compare them to, then calculate stuff and make sense of the results. A simple bar chart or line chart would help me a lot to better understand this dataset.

What I did:

  • first I needed some inspiration… I wanted a fresh colour palette to use for this week’s challenge so I wasted hours searched on Pinterest and stumbled across this beautiful photo by Chris Court Photography. Perfect!

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  • so as a first step, I created my ‘French Fries and Ketchup’ palette for Tableau. It was fun 🙂

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  • then I went back to pen and paper to draft some ideas for my dashboard and created my first version in Tableau. It was a pretty busy viz, mostly because I love the colour palette and wanted to use it to the max :-). I sent Andy a screenshot of the viz and got some rather frank feedback on my viz. And I’ll admit, it was a bad viz, because I just threw everything at it without thinking about what questions I wanted to answer.
  • so back I went to pen and paper once more and came up with a much simpler dashboard that provides an overview of the European Potato Industry in 2014…

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  • having gone through the data for my first version certainly helped clarify what I wanted to show in my final dashboard so this paper version took about 5 minutes to create. After that I took a break to do some real life stuff in the outside world with other humans, it’s the weekend after all.
  • returning to my desk a couple of hours later I managed to create my final viz in about 50 min, formatting and all. Very happy with that and it confirms once more that a good draft gets you half-way there. At least!
  • So without further ado, here is my final viz… (click for the interactive version)

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Makeover Monday- Week 7, 2017: How Much Do Americans Spend on Valentine’s Day?

Eva MurrayLeave a comment

Just as I started preparing my blog and viz for this week’s Makeover Monday, there was a change in the planned dataset to something a bit more, well, romantic…
It all started with this tweet earlier today:

Andy being ever responsive went out to chase down a poor visualisation and some data and I got to start from scratch ;-). But hey, it’s all in the name of love, so who am I trying to be all pragmatic and cynical? Love it is.

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What I like about it:

  • the colour choice helps me to easily understand that we’re talking about something love related. Pink and purple with nice contrasts
  • the heading is short and clear, it tells me immediately what I am going to learn more about
  • I like the context that is provided in the first paragraph
  • the images suit the different categories pretty well
  • I don’t even mind the donut chart, I think it is okay for showing me that a little over half the population is planning on celebrating Valentine’s Day
  • the data source is stated

What I don’t like:

  • It’s a bit too much pink for me. A white background with pink and purple as colours for the data would have worked just fine
  • the people category labels seem a bit awkward, they’re too long and descriptive
  • the labels for the $$$ values could be larger, I’d prefer to focus on those rather than having so much space ‘wasted’ on images
  • what year are we looking at? The source quoted at the bottom suggests it is 2015, but I don’t know for sure

What I did:

  • I started on paper and thought it would be fun to show you guys what my first draft looked like

  • I then moved on to pulling it together in Tableau. My colour scheme is based on a set of writing paper I have (and never use, let’s be honest), because I anticipate plenty of red and pink vizzes this week, so I needed something to break it up 🙂
  • I decided to focus on a couple of key statistics from 2016 and to look at how people (and pets) rank in terms of the money that is spent on them
  • apart from that I wanted to keep it simple and create something quick

(Click on the image below for the interactive version)

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Makeover Monday – Week 6, 2017: Inside Chicago’s Taxi Data

Eva Murray4 Comments

For week 6 of 2017 Andy and I decided to go large at Makeover Monday HQ (i.e. the WhatsApp chat window…). If you’re curious, you can read a bit more about it on the Makeover Monday website.

Taxi Taxi

We chose Chicago Taxi data that has been published by the City of Chicago. The dataset is pretty large with 105 million records and we chose it because it gives people an opportunity to work with data that contains geographical fields, dates and payments data and has plenty of scope for various types of visualisations.

Yes, there are A LOT of rows in this dataset, but the fields are pretty simple and the measures are limited to distance, duration, fare components and number of trips. Nothing complicated and hopefully something everyone can relate to.

The original viz comes from an article on transportation in Chicago and looks like this:

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What I like about it:

  • simple line chart with a single colour showing taxi trips and taxi fares over time (by month)
  • the y-axis has been truncated to highlight the movement in trips taken over time. This helps to see monthly changes more clearly
  • while I’m usually not a fan of gridlines, I think they actually work quite well here to divide up the chart area and guide the viewer to the values
  • the chart titles are clear and concise and tell the viewer immediately what they’re looking at
  • the data source is clearly stated at the bottom of each chart

What I don’t like:

  • the data is monthly but it is really hard to identify the individual months in the chart because there are no labels. The heading of chart 1 and my crude counting attempt makes me assume that the vertical gridlines show the end of each year rather than the middle or start. But I would like to know for sure, so some form of labeling or minor tick marks would help
  • does the second chart (taxi fares) start in Jan 2013 as well? I guess so but I can’t be certain.
  • I would also appreciate some labels along the line for the peaks and troughs in the data, especially those data points that are referred to in the article
  • the axis labels could be shortened with an ‘M’ suffix to save some space
  • the article states the data release following the Freedom of Information Act request included data from January 1, 2013, to June 30, 2016. Does that mean all of that data is included in these charts? I can’t figure out the range just by looking at them

What I did:

  • this time I wanted to go mobile again but with a landscape layout rather than a long form dashboard
  • My design inspiration actually came from the appstore and an app called 303 Taxi, which is a provider of Taxi services in Chicago
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  • I started my design process on paper because I was actually really pressed for time yesterday and needed to have a really solid draft version before starting to work in Tableau to bring it all together

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  • given that I had my paper version, creating the actual viz wasn’t that time consuming (formatting is another matter though…). I simply followed my draft and adjusted the content based on what I found interesting in the data. Along the way I updated the colours and formatting to what I wanted to final viz to look like.
  • given that I worked with the 105 million record data set, I couldn’t just publish my viz to Tableau Public, because workbooks there are limited to 15 million records of data. So I pointed my finished dashboard to the extract from the Makeover Monday website and changed a couple of charts to ensure there was still an interesting story (e.g. the highlight map on the right of the original viz is limited to a single row with the extract because we only included a single community area for pick-ups in that extract).
  • following my adjustments, I published the new workbook to Tableau Server, while the original viz can be seen below:
chicago-taxi-2013-2016
The original dashboard designed for mobile, using 105 million records live in EXASOL
  • If you want to check out the interactive viz on Tableau Public, please click on the image below.
    Please note: Unfortunately Tableau Public on mobile browser doesn’t allow for scrolling sideways, so this landscape format has been a complete fail from that perspective. I still like it. I might create a vertical version once I stop being annoyed about it…

chicago-taxi-2015-2016

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London Partner Summit

Eva MurrayLeave a comment

This past week I spent in London for work. Besides client and partner meetings I was there with my colleague, Carsten, to attend the Tableau Partner Leadership Summit for Tableau partners in EMEA.

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The summit is for Tableau’s partners which includes Resellers, Consulting and Technology partners across the many countries of Europe, the Middle East and Africa. It’s an opportunity for partners to learn, hear about updates, discuss strategy, sales, etc. and meet other partners.

My first Partner Summit

I hadn’t been to a partner summit before, but a couple of Tableau Conferences (data15 and data16) as well as two Tableau Conferences on Tour (Melbourne 2015 and Sydney 2016). While I didn’t know what to expect, I know ‘my Tableau people’ and figured it would be pretty fun, especially because I deal with many Tableau partners on a regular basis as part of my job. A lot of them happen to be my friends too.

It was really good to spend time with the great bunch of people working with and for Tableau here in Europe. A bit like a family reunion, but in suits instead of geeky t-shirts.

Presenting on the EXASOL & Tableau story

As EXASOL, the awesome company I work for, was one of the sponsors this year, we had a speaker slot for the breakout sessions. That meant Carsten and I had to prepare a presentation for Thursday morning, which wasn’t without its challenges in the past couple of weeks as I struggled to find time. But it was all finished and submitted with a few hours to spare and we spoke to an interested audience on Thursday morning about the EXASOL story and how we became a Technology Partner for Tableau.

While it’s always daunting to present, especially when speaking on behalf of your company, I really enjoyed it. I love talking about Tableau and the projects we have planned for 2017 (as far as I can talk about them at this point, need to keep a few surprises, right?), so that makes presenting fun. And of course, it’s good to practice public speaking as much as possible, because I find that as I progress in my career those speaking gigs feature more and more in my diary.

Networking marathon

Aside from our own presentation I didn’t actually get a chance to attend any sessions because I was literally talking to people non-stop from Wednesday evening until Friday afternoon.

I usually bumped into a few familiar faces during break times between sessions and we had a number of scheduled and ad hoc meetings with people interested in our software.

The discussions were engaging and really valuable, plus I learned a whole lot about various partners around the region and how they help their customers and clients with their data analytics and reporting challenges by introducing Tableau to the BI landscape.

The European buzz at PLS2017

Wednesday evening was the start of the summit with a welcome reception which meant a lot of ‘Hellos’ and hugs and sharing stories about what happened between data16 and now.

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I enjoyed the mix of languages all around me, including a lot of German being spoken. That was super cool, because at the global conference English is pretty much the exclusive language you hear. Over the past few days in London there were French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Arabic, Swedish, Finnish, Dutch and many other languages and it made my heart sing. Europe is my happy place and I just love having people from so many different cultures in one place. It’s a little bit like looking through your holiday photo album while listening to your favourite playlist.

Thursday started with an inspiring keynote by James Eiloart, VP, EMEA Sales, Tableau

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while Andy Cotgreave, Technical Evangelist at Tableau, was the MC for the event and brought plenty of enthusiasm and laughs to the stage.

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On Thursday evening the Partner Awards Dinner was held. I’ll never pass on an opportunity to get dressed up and to use multiple sets of knives and forks over the course of the evening. I might be a low-maintenance, practical person in daily life, but special occasions are fun!

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The after-party in the sky bar of the hotel was a nice way to finish the evening and a chance to chat with everyone in a more relaxed atmosphere. And the view from above was pretty cool, too!

The summit finished on Friday after a few more sessions, meetings and another great keynote, this time by Dave Story, VP, Product Development, Tableau.

Cool down

Following the summit Carsten and I didn’t have much time to relax as the next appointments on Friday afternoon were already in the diary, but thankfully we had Saturday to unwind from a pretty exhausting week.

Data School Graduation night
Data School Graduation night

After a delicious and indulgent breakfast at Borough Markets we split up to play tourists and pick up some presents for our families.

I spent a few hours wandering the streets of Southwark, Waterloo and the City of London districts, looking at shops, eating more food and visiting churches, taking photos and crossing bridges.

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With every visit I fall in love with London a little bit more. Even the rain can’t put me off. It’s a fun and energetic city with so many sights, monuments, churches and historical buildings on every corner. You can hardly catch your breath and I often find myself standing in amazement, staring up at some ancient church or a plaque indicating a significant place.

There are so many alley-ways, traditional pubs, glitzy stores, posh restaurants and quirky shops, you simply can’t get bored…

I soaked it all up for a few hours before heading to the airport for the journey home. On the train I started getting ready for the next Makeover Monday challenge with a few conversations on Twitter that have me super excited about the data for week 6. I cannot wait to see what people will create!

And that brings me to the end of this week. With the Partner Summit over I hope to have a bit more breathing space  to return to regular blogging and work on my Alteryx workflow projects, so you should find more frequent posts on this page in the weeks to come.

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Makeover Monday – Week 5, 2017: Employment Growth in G-7 Countries

Eva MurrayLeave a comment

For this week, Andy once again delights us with a very small dataset: 1 dimension, 2 measures, 7 rows of data. I can already sense the frustration that some people will feel because how big and elaborate a dataviz can one build with only 14 values? I am, on the other hand, delighted. A great dataset to keep things simple. As simple as possible.

So let’s look at this week’s challenge. It’s an article by Elena Holodny in Business Insider UK discussing the 2010 (Q1) to 2016 (Q3) growth of employment in G-7 countries. These include Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The data visualisation in the article shows the following pie charts, which depict employment growth as Share of Total Employment and Share of Net Growth in Employment with each country being a wedge of the pie.

original

What I like about it:

  • the colours for each wedge are very distinct, so it is easy to differentiate the countries based on colour
  • the labels are large enough to be legible
  • the title is pretty clear, identifying what (employment growth) was measured, in which context (G-7 countries) and for which timeframe (2010:Q1-2016:Q3)
  • the headings for each of the two pie charts also specifies which measure is being shown and that the numbers are percentages, which by including in the heading saves space on the chart
  • I’m glad they included the note on rounding to ensure people understand the ‘limitations’
  • the data source is stated

What I don’t like:

  • the formatting of the title and individual chart headings looks cluttered. Keeping the font regular instead of bold, or using a lighter font would have helped, as well as leaving more white space – it’s all a bit too dense for me
  • it’s a pie chart, with 7 wedges. It’s not the easiest for viewers to visually comprehend the proportions attributed to each G-7 country
  • the labels for the small wedges sit off the side of the chart, which looks inconsistent
  • having the pie charts next to each other almost feels like we should be comparing them like a ‘before and after’, but they need to be looked at separately, because they visualise completely different measures that don’t have a direct relation
  • the branding/logos take up valuable space. Are they really necessary? Would a small icon in the corner suffice?

What I did:

  • after playing with the data and reading a bunch of articles to get a better understanding of it, I decided to settle on a simple bar chart to just show the differences in percentages between the countries
  • I wanted to finally design a mobile viz, so I went fully mobile rather than adding different device layouts
  • I’ve also grown quite fond of large labels and dual labels on a single mark, so I spend a bit of time trying out different approaches until I settled on something I liked
  • and because I created a new colour palette this week, I chose to use a different colour for each country. In part that’s also because I divided the charts across 2 mobile screens (when you scroll down), so I wanted to make it easy for the viewer to recognise the countries based on colour.

(Click for the interactive version)

employment-share-and-growth-in-g-7-countries

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Work Life Balance

Eva MurrayLeave a comment

Work-Life Balance, in my opinion, is finding enough time for work and personal life, but what ‘enough’ looks like changes constantly. It’s also about attitude. For those who hate their jobs, even just working 10 hours a week won’t let them find that perfect equilibrium where they experience a state of bliss and a sense of satisfaction with their life as a whole.

Luck has nothing to do with it

Admittedly, it’s easy for me to make these statements, because job-wise I have hit the jackpot and life-wise it’s been smooth sailing since day 1. But what a lot of people may attribute to ‘luck’ and ‘good fortune’ is simply the result of deliberate work that started all the way back in my high-school days.

Achieving a balance between work stuff and life stuff is something I definitely see as important, but for me there are no clear rules for it that apply universally and there certainly is no way of saying that a 20/30/40 hour work week will achieve the desired balance.

Some weeks I work 40 hours as per my contract, have plenty of time to ride my bike, go on weekend adventures with my husband and binge-watch whatever TV series we happen to enjoy at that time. Other weeks, like the last few, I work significantly more. But it’s hard to measure how much exactly, because the lines become blurred and it doesn’t stop with me stepping out the office at the end of the day.

You see, my job involves A LOT of networking with people from the Tableau community and beyond. That happens face to face, via email, WhatsApp, Twitter and LinkedIn, via webex and Skype and at various events. Of course some of that is between 9am and 5pm, but more often than not, communicating with ‘Tableau people’ across the globe happens at all hours of the day. It starts when I wake up at 5am (Hello, Twitter notifications!) and finishes when I switch off the light at 9.30pm. And you know what? I like it that way. It’s up to me to put my phone down and close my laptop but I also have the freedom to do what I love whenever I want to.

My job isn’t unique with regard to the type of things I do, and lots of people operate the same way. It doesn’t feel like work to me though, because I would talk to many of the people in my network anyway. Now I just have many more things to talk to them about, because my role gives me the opportunity to get more involved, try out new ideas and drive forward initiatives that contribute to the community.

And my private life? Leisure time? When does that happen?

Well the way I see it is that leisure time is what I need to ‘recover’ and to recharge my batteries. Yes, they need recharging but when I do something I love and enjoy and find fulfilling, there isn’t really much recovery needed. Yes, I need sleep and my brain needs a break, but it’s not like I come home from work on a Friday evening wishing for a 4 day weekend. In fact, after a couple of hours of watching brainless TV shows and eating whatever is left in the fridge, I’m usually already thinking about something work-related and I haven’t had a single weekend when I didn’t look forward to heading back to the office on Monday.

And I’m not writing this just because my colleagues or my boss might read it. I’m German, we don’t mince our words, and we’re certainly stingy when it comes to compliments. So I truly mean it, I do love Mondays because it means there’s a week of fun and challenges and hard work and rewarding achievements ahead.

The right job and a good plan

Having a job that I love makes it easy for me to achieve work-life balance, because neither work nor personal life tips the scales into an imbalance that I need to somehow compensate for.

The only challenge that a demanding (but fulfilling) job brings, is the need for excellent time management and organisation skills and some good support at home.

I’ve always been pretty good at getting stuff done and planning my schedule to fit everything in. To achieve my weekly training load I need to be diligent to get enough sleep and food at the right time, but it’s just a habit now, much like brushing my teeth. It doesn’t require natural talent or some serious willpower, it’s just doing the things that work over and over again until they become so ingrained that you can’t mess them up.

Plus a bunch of supportive people

I also have the benefit of a supportive husband who takes on many of the tasks at home so I can focus on the stuff I do best. It’s all well and good to bring home the money for food and rent, but without someone to actually go to the supermarket (which is often closed by the time I get home), the fridge would be pretty empty. Having Paul take on the ‘household logistics’, manage our cleaner, help my parents run their business and study German, takes an immense load off my shoulders. It means I can tightly pack my schedule during the week. And on the weekend I fill my day however I please.

My parents are also pretty legendary in helping me. Whenever I visit them, mum has something ready for me to eat. Whether I’m hungry or not. They let me use one of their cars when I need it and get groceries from the local market gardener down the road. They pick up my bikes from the mechanic (open 10am to 6pm on weekdays – how convenient… not…), water our plants when we go away for a few days and are always ready to lend a hand when I dream up a new DIY project to make it look nicer around here. They’re also happen to listen anytime and are my biggest cheerleaders even when they don’t understand what on earth I am talking about.

You’ll know when you’ve found ‘The One’

If you were hoping for the magic work-life balance formula, I’m sorry to have disappointed you here. I don’t think there is one. But I strongly believe that many jobs, especially the ones in the new economy that offer flexibility, interesting challenges and have a scope that can be redefined as required, have the chance to enable anyone to find the sweet spot where things are humming along. Those jobs let you finish each day with a smile and the satisfying exhaustion that mean your last thought of the day is not ‘thank God it’s over’, but rather ‘I can’t wait to do it all again tomorrow!’

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Makeover Monday – Week 4, 2017: International Tourism Spend in New Zealand

Eva Murray2 Comments

This week’s data takes us all the way to a beautiful little country at the end of the earth. That’s what it feels like to live there and it certainly is far from most people’s minds and their maps as they were designed with Europe at the centre of everything.

But New Zealand, this humble nation downunder, thousands of kilometers even from its neighbouring big brother, Australia, is such a cool place that I thought more people should learn about it. That’s the reason why I chose to find an NZ data story for this week’s makeover challenge.

Aside from that, I’ve been looking for more localised content that goes beyond UK and US or global data and am pleased to have found some data on NZ tourism spending as well as an optional data set with geospatial data for all those contributors who want to do some mapping.

Let’s start with the original viz…

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In the accompanying notes, Figure.nz provide a lot of information around the data, where it was sourced from, how it was collected and what limitations there are, as well as what’s included and excluded. The notes proved to be very useful for understanding the data and I hope that all those who participate in this week’s challenge read the notes as well…

What I like about it:

  • Despite the multiple colours, it is actually a fairly simple bar chart with the height of the bar indicating the regional tourism index by month across three different years
  • The colours are quite distinct from each other, so are easy enough to differentiate but still work fairly well together as a palette; the legends are prominent but not ‘in the way’
  • The baseline index of 100 (from 2008) is stated in the subheading, which helps to put the results into perspective
  • The data source is listed (this is always a favourite of mine!)
  • The heading is succinct
  • The gridlines are kept to a minimum so they guide the viewer without cluttering up the viz

What I don’t like:

  • It would help if the main heading specified that the tourism spend is shown as an index rather than a dollar figure, which is what people would likely assume when they first read it
  • With the calendar year shown in the usual order, the story to me has a negative connotation because in both charts we can see a dip as the year progresses before spend picks up again.
    Given that New Zealand is in the Southern Hemisphere, the seasons are reversed from those in the Northern Hemisphere, so the middle of the year is winter and therefore low season.
    I think it would be more reflective of the overall trend of increased tourism spend to align the months accordingly and start the x-axis with either June (the beginning of winter, the lowest month usually) or September (the beginning of spring and when tourism tends to pick up)
  • As much as I love bar charts, I think they’re not perfect for visualizing this kind of comparison of different years across months. With the above visualisation I find myself ‘starting from scratch’ every month and rethinking what I’m looking at. I’d like to be able to see the overall trend much more easily and at first glance.
  • A bit of commentary or some annotations would be nice to explain some of the pattern or point out certain events that may have impacted the data.

What I did:

(Click for the interactive version)

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  • I wanted to created a bit of a story rather than ‘fixing’ what I didn’t like in the original chart, so I opted for a long-format dashboard with three sections
  • I opted for a black colour scheme which I decided on right away. New Zealand has a strong association with the colour black, thanks to its sporting teams, so it is involved in branding all over the place, especially with Tourism NZ.
  • I had a grand design in mind, but I lack the skills for it so after some initial experimenting I dropped the lofty ideas and settled for simplicity instead
  • As a German who lived in NZ for 8 years and also has an NZ passport, I found the focus on international visitors more interesting so I stuck to that
  • As part of my iterative data exploration I created a simple line chart for international visitors and flicked through each region to see where the interesting trends were. I had thought that The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings would provide an interesting angle and the data confirmed this and the story started to come together
  • I decided to focus on the region of Matamata-Piako where the Hobbiton film set is located. This region has seen a huge growth in tourism spend over the last years and that’s what I wanted to show
  • Colour wise I needed to find something that goes well with the black background. White has the strongest contrast so that was the main colour for the line charts and labels etc. As a secondary colour and to highlight Matamata as the focus of my story, I picked a golden hue of deep yellow which aims to remind people of the ring from the movies.
  • To provide a bit of context of where Matamata actually is, I wanted to include a map as well. New Zealand is so far away, most people don’t really know much about its geography. So here’s a chance to learn more and I included a small map highlighting the region in focus.
  • Lastly I added some text boxes listing data sources and my details and applied the final formatting.
  • This viz took longer than 1 hour. I probably wasted 1 hour trying to be artsy before going back to the start. The core content and main formatting took around 2 hours, then some fine tuning and layout changes before I was finished.

Andy promised me that it wouldn’t hurt if I tried to go for the long-format layout and he’s right, it wasn’t that bad. I tend to prefer to see ‘everything on a page’, but it’s nice to have more room. Containers can still be a headache but for the most part it was easy to use this format and allowed me to think in ‘sections’ or chapters. Check out how Andy approached the challenge this week here

I genuinely hope that everyone who participates this week enjoys this dataset and learning a little about Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud, and a stunning place on this planet that you ought to visit at some point.

If you want to read something non-data related on the topic, feel free to check out an article I wrote last year during our visit to Wellington before moving to Germany…

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All or nothing

Eva Murray2 Comments

Last year I participated in Makeover Monday around 20 times. That’s not even 50% of the vizzes. This year I committed to not only submitting a viz every week, but to also write a blog post for each viz, find articles and data for 26 of the weekly challenges, write 26 weekly recap posts, and engage in the social media fun that comes with it: tweets, retweets, responses, messages, likes, sharing elsewhere and spreading the love.

Absolutely no regrets! Ever since week 1 it’s been great fun and I’m really enjoying it, because I get to be so much more involved in the community.

When I do something I find it easier to commit 100% or not at all. So doing every makeover for me is an easier commitment than saying ‘I’ll do the makeovers that look fun’ or just focusing on the topic that is easiest to visualise etc.

Joining Andy in running the project meant that I have made it part of my daily and weekly routine. Yes, there is a lot of ad hoc work, especially around Twitter, but certain tasks have a reasonably set schedule: Sunday is time to post the data. Doing it every 2 weeks means I can spend the ‘off’ weeks searching for good MM articles instead of preparing data. Sunday afternoon I usually spend doing my Makeovers because I don’t have time to do so at work on Mondays. Unless there is an opportunity to do a ‘Live Makeover Monday event’ like we did in London last week.
While I build my viz, I also draft the blog article that goes with it, including my critique of the original article and chart. Then it all gets published.

Once the data is out there, the real fun starts. Don’t get me wrong, I love building the vizzes and I also enjoy writing about the process, but the really fun aspect of this whole project is talking to you guys, the community, via Twitter about the submissions. It’s hard not to miss a submission as they come in very quickly on Sunday evening and then on Monday it’s a real deluge :-). But I love that. I wake up on Monday morning and my Twitter feed is full of vizzes, tweets and retweets from the Makeover Monday crew.

After getting through the first wave of that and eating some breakfast before I start work, everything starts humming at a more consistent pace and there are usually a number of discussions along the way. And of course as the week progresses we get to choose our favourites from all the submissions for our Friday recap blog post. In between Andy and I chat about Makeover Monday related stuff pretty much every day: new ideas for MM challenges, changes to the website, data we have found, interesting initiatives that would align with MM, potential live MM events, etc.

And then just like that it’s Friday, the second ‘hump’ of the week when we publish the recap post before settling into the weekend and gearing up for the next challenge to be released.

It’s a great project and I love being part of it. Compared to last year when I submitted vizzes every now and then (with a big hiatus over summer), this year my commitment has been much easier to maintain. Doing it every week is easier. It’s all or nothing. And that’s how I like it 🙂