Week 33 brought forth the challenge of moving the reference date for a Percent Change calculation based on a parameter. Along the way, VizWizBI put in the usual hidden gems and stumpers. The inspiration came from Curtis Harris.

For me, it’s nice to see when I get to the end result and I’ve achieved the same result as the designer of the challenge via different means/methods. I’m not always as efficient, but it certainly proves I’ve not just copied someone else’s work!

First, I needed to figure out the value at the selected parameter date. Here’s where I fumbled the most to start. Eventually I landed on an LOD that got this for me.

From there, some simple math to get the Percent Change

Reference lines gave me the intersection lines, and I got the dot at that point with this

And here it is!

Cheers!

This week’s #WorkoutWednesday challenge (available here) from @EmmaWhyte involved continuous dates. Per usual I figured this to be an easy solve, one that I nearly wanted to give up on, and then all at once the light bulb goes off and we’re rolling. Here’s my solution and the necessary solves.

The tricky bit with continuous dates is that, by their very nature, they move along a continuous line, but the example workbook has them stacked as discrete date parts would be. First thought here, and Year([Order Date]) to color and we’re off. Good start, next add Month([Order Date]) to Columns, switch to Discrete… and fail. Because I’ve got a Discrete Date part on color, it’s segmenting into 4 parts, not stacking. To the drawing board…

The solve here was to create a custom date whereby we ‘trick’ Tableau into putting all into the same year, and because we have the Year on color, it segments into 4 lines. Here’s my custom date (you could pick any year):

DATE("1900-"+STR(MONTH([Order Date]))+"-"+STR(DAY([Order Date])))

The remaining work was rather straighforward (so I found at least), you’ll have to add back the year for the tooltip in a separate calculation, which I did like this:

DATE(STR(YEAR([Order Date]))+”-“+STR(MONTH([Order Date]))+”-“+STR(DAY([Order Date])))

I may have ‘cheated’ as I put my title into a separate sheet and combined in the dashboard, whereas Emma had the title in the same sheet. I find this to be the beauty of the product and challenges is, as with programming, there isn’t one ‘right’ solution – but there may be better/worse ways of arriving at the end goal.

Week 26’s challenge from Emma was a really fun one, and for me expanded my knowledge in very valuable ways. The premise for the week’s challenge was to visualise (British English just in time for the fourth ;)). The overall goal was to create a Trellis chart for each of the Constituencies in each region, and to show the change in overall share by party from 2015 to 2017. Where the challenge really had me thinking I’d get stumped was on the sorting. I’d never implemented a parameter to sort Trellis charts based on the selection, but was ready for the challenge. Here’s the final outcome. Keep reading for how I solved some of the challenges. If you’re new to small multiples/Trellis charts, there’s plenty of resources out there, including the post Andy Cotgreave wrote in 2011.

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After a few weeks of Andy Kriebel rocking my attempts to easily conquer #WorkoutWednesday, I’m back this week and sucessfully took on Emma’s Week 22 challenge of recreating this viz she found in the Economist.

The trickiest bit here for me was the aliasing of ‘Correct’, ‘Partially Correct’ and ‘Incorrect’. I solved this by adding an extra whitespace to the end of each alias value, but this could have been accomplished as Emma did (as I found out by downloading her workbook) by creating two different calculations. Easy night, I’m satisfied!

Here’s the embedded Tablet View, and the full version can be found on Tableau Public.

Week 18’s #WorkoutWednesday  challenge has a lot of potential in varying applications. The challenge was to show/hide visualizations based on a set of navigation icons.  This gives the user the appearance of activating vizzes by clicking the related icon, but without loading a new dashboard.

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Ahhh, week 16’s challenge takes me back to my early days with Tableau. My eagerness to master Tableau had me watching all of the Tableau-provided training videos. I’d recalled the Bollinger Bands charts from the advanced charting section. I do a bit of financial analysis at my day job, but I’d not yet put one of these to use within Tableau. Knowing fully how well Tableau handles moving averages with table calcs, I figured this to be a breeze.

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Finally! A week where I got stumped but for less than 5 minutes. A good feeling, but as Andy says, this week will be “pretty easy”. Easy enough, I suppose; still a good mental workout.

The challenge this week was to create one chart with two representations of data; one using a Level of Detail express and the other a Table Calculation.

I’m writing this post simply off my own work; I’ve not yet dared download Andy’s workbook – I want to enjoy the feeling of conquering this weeks’ challenge before I discover how much more elegantly he solved for this. That’s the fun of these challenges and Tableau – multiple paths to solve for the problem at hand. Read more

Week 10. Another week’s challenge, and another oh so close reconstruction of the visualization. Here, I set a personal best to re-creating the entire dashboard; except it took me over an hour to get the ‘size of hex’ parameter to work.

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Another week (working backward) and another #WorkoutWednesday I was sure I’d solve. The challenge for week 12 was to allow for a highlight within a treemap. Initially didn’t seem all that practical, but seeing the power of this – with the user able to select/highlight within the treemap – I may end up using this one.

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