So many choices at the Madison Square Eats food rally this weekend. Â If only I had a dashboard… According to Merriam-Webster, a dashboard was “a screen on the front of a usually horse-drawn vehicle to intercept water, mud, or snow.” They were meant to protect the driver. Â Do modern dashboards protect us from the onslaught […]
Continue readingIt’s sunny in NJ today. Â Are big data stock raining money? First, I am not a stock analyst. Â Just read this post as my curiosity about how big data stocks are doing and the potential following Tableau Software’s IPO on May 17. What I see in the chart below is pretty interesting. Â Many companies I […]
Continue readingMy kids’ artwork was selected for the annual school show. Â Make some Tableau art. I’d like you to set aside 20 minutes this week (mark it on your calendar). Â If your day is like mine, as a practitioner you are focused on the work of visualization — wrangling data, building vizs, testing, etc. There is […]
Continue readingMy daughter won elite gold in her dance competition.  Design your winning viz! In my last post, Replicating your old vizs in Tableau? STOP NOW (please)!, you learned specific steps to break away from old visualization thinking.  Now it’s time to turn those ideas into vizs. Rather than work with Tableau or other software right away, […]
Continue readingMy son achieved his Bar Mitzvah this weekend. Â Are your vizs coming of age? You have a shiny new version of Tableau Desktop, connected to the big data server, then reproduced your same old charts. Access to data on your terms is no longer an issue, so what’s up with that? Is a status-quo/ can’t-change-too-fast […]
Continue readingI was working with a client in Chicago and enjoyed some deep-dish pizza. Build a deep visual toolbox. I’ve written about teams oppressed by “the tyranny of pie charts ™.”  So set in their ways, they cannot break free from ineffective visuals simply because they fear change. However, when you successfully break free, it’s imperative […]
Continue readingI am mesmerized by my guitar hero Joe Satriani’s flying fingers. Â Get as good at visuals. In his book “Outliers,” Malcolm Gladwell wrote that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert. Â That’s over 27 years if you invest one hour/day and almost a decade if you up that to three hours/day. Â WOW! Many of […]
Continue readingAl Gore now claims to have invented data visualization.  Learn the truth… It is April 1.  On a more serious point, Al Gore’s “Our Choice” digital journal set a new direction for combining interactivity with text.  I’m excited about the possibilities and of course have a twist in mind. Many visualization practitioners lean toward the idea […]
Continue readingAre your brackets being eliminated? Â Remove everything possible from your visualizations. Visualization practitioners frequently mention Edward Tufte’s concept of the data-ink ratio, which refers to the ink (pixels) used to present data. What you rarely hear about is the non-data-ink ratio, which refers to elements such as scales, labels, borders, etc. Both sides of the […]
Continue readingIt’s baseball season and we’re sure to hear about performance enhancers. Â Supercharge your visuals. Many of my clients ask “How do we get more people to use the reports we built with our latest business intelligence / visualization software?” The answer is simple and complex for three reasons: #1 Practitioners replicate the same charts they […]
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