Tableau Tips & Tricks

Austin Tableau User Group

November 5, 2014

Cory Jez

Global BI Reporting Developer

Purpose To show some “quick-win” opportunities to leverage

Tableau’s capabilities in day-to-day work

Topics to Cover

HomeAway Tableau Environment

Tableau Server

Distribution

Easy Branding

Dashboarding

Hacking Tableau

Looking to others who use Tableau

Tableau DataSources New Way Old Way

- Custom SQL driving Tableau Server datasources

- Messy and hard to edit - No help from DBA’s

- Many CASE statements and

transformation logic

- Redundancies on our Tableau Server

- Tableau Server datasources pull directly from a SQL view

- Views are named with “TAB” preceding so their use is clear

- Perform transformation logic at the datasource level

Benefits of the “New Way”

• Put processing on SQL’s shoulders

• More options with optimization

• Adding fields, no risk of “breaking” things

Tableau Server - Navigation

• Problem

– The user interface within TS can be “fun” to navigate

– Several clicks required to get where you want to go

Tableau Server - Navigation

Solution

- Chrome plugin that lets you

see thumbnails of dashboards

and click straight into them

Tableau Server - Navigation

Tableau Server - Navigation

Here is the link for the plugin https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-chrome-extension-f/kfnclbnbnhglklkpdlhfaopofekmckfe?hl=en-GB

Tableau Server - Datasources

• Problem

– You open up a datasource in Tableau desktop, and

when you drag in a field, you only see a few items

– You need to know what SQL (or other datasource) is

driving the tableau server datasource

Tableau Server - Datasources

Solution

- Leverage Tableau Server API to download the datasource

and see its underlying SQL and logic

https://SERVERURL/datasources/eCommMonthlyCounts.tds?no_extract=true

Distribution - Static

• Problem

– My VP wants to grab a screenshot of a dashboard to

drop into a PowerPoint deck

– The export functionality is not very obvious in Tableau

Server and can even be deactivated with permissioning

• Solution

- Add a file extension to the end of the URL

- .pdf

- .png

- .csv

Easy Branding

• Problem

– But Cory, the HomeAway Color Palette isn’t available in Tableau, and always changing those RGB’s is a pain

– And even though we have a formatting guide, I can’t save those colors in Tableau!

Easy Branding

• Solution

– Add default colors into your Preferences document

located in My Tableau Repository

=

Easy Branding

• Here is the code to paste into your preferences

document

<?xml version='1.0'?> <workbook> <preferences> <color-palette name=“My Color Palette" type="regular" > <color>#2A6EBB</color> #repeat this for any other colors </color-palette> </preferences> </workbook>

Dashboarding

• Problem

– Those little things that pop up when you hover over a

data point are really ugly and what does that even mean?

Dashboarding

• Solution

– Always remember to build out your tooltips, you can

have them read very clean, and even add bar charts!

Barcharts inside of Tooltips

Dashboarding • Problem

– I’m running out of room on my dashboard, but have a

whole list of details I want to show about a view.

Dashboarding

• Solution

– Utilize “on demand” details that act as a pop-up,

which saves space but provides additional info

Hacking The Tableau XML

• Problem

– Someone has sent you a workbook and you get the

following error message

Hacking The Tableau XML

• Solution

– Open the workbook in your favorite text editor (right click “open with”, and change the underlying version of the workbook

Hacking The Tableau XML

– You can also do a lot of other things in the XML like • Change colors

• Change datasources

• Delete sheets from a workbook

• Move a workbook from a dev server to a production server

Questions?

cjez@homeaway.com