Tuesday, January 19, 2010


EIMS - Water Samples for Snohomish Watershed using Tableau

This data came from EIMS, their website is here:

http://www.ecy.wa.gov/eim/

A few notes:
  • I culled data for only the last ten years, and only for the snohomish area.
  • The contractors who actually performed the contaminant samples often used different units of measure, as a result of using different testing methods. So I have placed a filter for UOM to help verify the test results. In plain english: the time trend and its 'median' value reported is bogus information if you mix your UOM types.
  • I removed any concept of what testing method they used, what the baseline observable measurement was, etc.
  • you can select a sample type, then lasso some data marks on the timeline to see individual sample reports.
  • The Tableau tooltips are nicely formatted; take a look at those!
  • clicking on the "links" item will show a bing map of the sample location. Hovering back over that same selected link item will also show two other links, to NIH.gov and wikipedia (for the contaminant in question)
  • In short: this was mostly an experiment with Tableau features, as opposed to a deep dive into water quality and contaminant analysis.





Friday, January 8, 2010


Tableau Dashboard - small widget dashboard




With only a little bit of thought and care, you can create extremely polished dashboard widgets like the one shown below. I used just a small amount of HTML code to create a simple navigation scheme shown on the left below, which in turn points to various published visuals. Nice and easy!







Marketing


Finance


Operations


Map











Tableau Dashboard - Multi-Language Support

The following is a dashboard using microsoft's adventureworks data, which happens to include support for multi-byte languages such as arabic. Tableau supports multi-byte and extended character sets inside of all visualizations. Now, if only I could actually read arabic, this view might mean something to me...

If you speak arabic and see that there is something wrong from a technical point of view, let me know. If the translation is just 'terrible', then let microsoft know.