I really loved my Tableau 2017

Today is New Years Eve, and I'm sitting on my couch watching the morning news. I have a nice cup of coffee and my laptop. Seems like a great time to take a look back at 2017, and reflect on the year.

Speaking Engagements 

You can ask anyone that knows me, I am not a fan of public speaking. I get choked up with panic attacks, and feel like passing out, it's not a good time. But last year I made a commitment to myself that I would try to do speaking engagements in 2017. Luckily, I was able to do 3! I presented twice at two different Florida TUGs, one in Orlando and one in Jacksonville. I really enjoyed these, as it allowed me to teach a lot of cool tips/tricks to enthusiastic Tableau Users, and I got to meet a lot of great people. 

As much as I enjoyed speaking for my local TUGs, my favorite presentation was at the Tableau Conference with one of my fellow Zen Masters Adam McCann. We presented Jedi Charts: Creating Custom Charts in Tableau. Adam was great in keeping me calm, and making sure we got plenty of practice in. Thankfully, we had a great presentation. For my part, I demoed how to create an Area Bump Chart and a Non-Ribbon Chord Link Diagram. My favorite part of all this? I've seen multiple people in the community use the techniques I talked about in their own vizzes. 

Collaborations

2017 was the first year that I collaborated with others on public vizzes. I had the absolute pleasure in helping to contribute to two incredible vizzes with some wonderfully talented people.

The first collaboration I did was with the the super talented Jonni Walker and Chris Demartini on the Kakapo. I was very proud to be a part of this project as it actually made an impact. It helped raise awareness on an incredible bird that is fighting to stay in existence, and the amazing team behind them. 

The second viz I collaborated on was with Jacob Olsufka. He messaged me on Twitter one day about working on a Triple Play Baseball Viz, and showed me an image of PI as a Chord Diagram. This project was quite a challenge from a technical perspective. We had to work a lot through the Maths and figure out exactly how the data needed to be modeled in order to make it work in Tableau. This project took.....a while. But, I'm glad it did, Jacob has a really amazing eye for design.

I loved this viz, and collaborating with Jacob was amazing. But, the best part of this project was yet to come. When the International Information is Beautiful Awards nominations opened up, I thought, why not submit this viz. I asked Jacob and he was cool with it, so I went ahead and submitted it in. I really didn't think much of it, but then we made it on the Longlist of nominees. We were very thrilled, but it's when we got Shortlisted that things got really excited. This meant our viz would be presented at the awards ceremony. I really wanted to go to London for the event, but had too many prior engagements. Luckily, Jacob did get to go, and he took plenty of pictures!

The Vizzes

Including the projects I collaborated on, I also created a ton of visualizations this year. I don't like putting "favorites" to my vizzes, since I they are all so different, so I'll talkt about the Viz of the Days this year. Including the two collaboration projects (both were VOTD), I had 4 additional VOTDs in 2017. I really like this line up because it shows my belief in the Visual Spectrum. All 4 of these are uniquely different from one another. I wanted 2017 to be a year where I flex my visual design abilities. 2016 was the year of Curves (for better of for worse), so when 2017 came, I told myself I needed to expand. My goal was to not only grow my own skills, but hopefully to inspire the community. I wanted to show that data can be visualized in a lot of different ways, but the how and why depends on what the goal of that viz is. 

In addition to the VOTDs I had in 2017, there was one other viz that I really enjoyed. The reason being, the visual and technique I developed in it, led to my presentation at Tableau Conference. The Area Bump Chart. This was a pain to figure out, but it fit my data and story beautifully. I really tried to create a Journalistic Infographic that told the data effectively, while being presented beautifully.

The Tips and my blog

As much as I enjoy vizzing, my true passion is helping the community. I love breaking Tableau open and figuring out how it all works, and then sharing that knowledge with others. The thing is, I try to make a really hard effort in writing "unique" blog posts. Our community is amazing, and there are a lot of talented people coming up with great techniques all the time. So trying to find new/different techniques can be a challenge, but it is a lot of fun.

I have written 20 blog posts this year (including this one). Below are all the Tips/Tricks from 2017 

• How to move a reference line "to the back" 
• Displaying Hours and Minutes
• How to Area Bump Chart
• How to Shade between two Lines
• How to Split Up a long Bar Chart
• Create Dynamic Reference Areas on Dimensions
• Dynamically shade Outliers with Reference Bands
• Automatic Bins and Beeswarm Plots in Tableau
• Step Chart without Data Modelling
• Creating a Jump Plot with Polynomial Trend Lines
• How to Density Scatter Plot
• How to fix Bar Chart Widths "Just Right"
• Radial Mapping and Lasso in Tableau
• Plotting Rank Deviations in Tableau
• Polygon Hex Map in Tableau
• Configurable Polygon 12 Month Calendar

17 "How To's" shatters my 2016 number, and I'm really happy about this. I really wanted to create good content that could help the community, and show how Tableau can be used "differently". The best part of these how to's in the number of tips/tricks inside of them. I really tried to add a lot of things in each post, making them as detailed as possible with plenty of images to help guide the user.

2018

Looking forward to 2018, I want to continue pushing my abilities, and helping the community. To being, I want to be more involved in the VizAlerts project from Matt Coles and Jonathan Drummey. It is an incredible open source tool, and I want to focus more of my time and energy into pushing it even further. I also want to win at the Information is Beautiful Awards, aka, I want to make a very memorable visualization, something that people talk about. Additionally, I want to continue expanding my Coding skills, and develop Extensions that can be used by the community. And finally, I just want to continue being a part of this incredible community, and give as much as I possibly can to it.