Hello again from the end of Day 2 at Tableau Conference 2022 (TC22) in sunny Las Vegas! The in-person and virtual attendees from Beezwax’s Data Analytics & Tableau development teams shared more highlights of TC22 sessions, with information, insights and a few key takeaways.
Read Day 1 session and conference highlights here.
Read Day 3 session and closing highlights here.
By the way, most of these sessions are recorded, so these highlights also serve as a checklist toward future learning and review.
How to do cool stuff in Tableau
As Tableau users and developers, we often know the destination we seek with data visualization and analytic insights, but are always learning better paths to get there. This session was a combination of both ‘Wow!’ and How To, with the Flerlage Twins highlighting some new tips and tricks for doing cool things in Tableau:
- Using table calculations in place of level of detail (LOD) calculations
- Editing a field inline in order to keep the colors while changing the field used
- Using transparent images and coloring to make graphs and charts highlight the points you want
- Floating transparent images to create hyperlinks wherever they are needed
- Fixing spacing issues with blank Unicode characters
- Using navigation buttons configured with transparent images in order to create a navigation from one full background image.
Use the Hyper API as a Data Lake Engine in Python
Leverage the Hyper API / Update API to Keep Your Data Fresh on Tableau Server
These two sessions were Hands On, using Tableau’s Hyper API and Update API.
The first session started by walking through using the Tableau Hyper API to pull data into Python from CSV and AWS S3. They discussed using Pandas DataFrames and various Python libraries available to manipulate data. There are now so many options for ETL and data manipulation using the REST API, Tableau Server Client and the Hyper API. “Very timely and very useful. After stepping through the provided exercises, I used the info they gave to troubleshoot some Python scripts I had just written.” (Sarah).
The second session could have overlapped the first, but turned out to complement it quite well. The presenters were among the most knowledgeable at TC22, and they focused more on data source management, getting data from API sources, publishing/refreshing and doing incremental refreshes.
The Hyper API is definitely “the future” and we’re looking forward to leveraging it for future heavy lifting with Tableau integration projects.
Beautiful Business Dashboards: The How and the Why
This session showed beautiful dashboards, and specific techniques from the presenters, Samuel Parsons and Simon Beaumont. The theme was simplification. Sorry that we didn’t have a chance to take any pics, because we were furiously taking notes about techniques for:
- using reference lines as labels
- labeling bar charts, simply
- elegantly using placeholder bars
- simplifying colors and shapes
Less is definitely more!
Meet Them Where They Work: [MLB’s] Texas Rangers Bringing Data and Analytics to Players and Coaches
A case study about MLB’s Texas Rangers, as a professional baseball franchise they now exist as a data-heavy enterprise. Every baseball game captures tons of data — way beyond box scores, these days we’re talking “big data”. This session covered a brief history of data in baseball and then walked through a day in the life of a data analyst for the Rangers organization.
Iron Viz 2022
This competition has been a not-to-be-missed event at every Tableau Conference, and TC22 was no exception. The three contestants did some amazing work. Will Sutton won with his data story about Closing The Youth Literacy Gap that included amazing animations and clever ways to show the audience the impact of literacy around the world, particularly in the places where it’s lacking. Kimly Scott’s’s dashboard highlighted the differences between Australia and her home country of Cambodia and how growing up in Australia impacted her. CJ Mayes’s dashboard included violin graphs and gauge charts added to a map using some tricky trigonometry that was very impressive. Overall some interesting insights!