All by Ollie Linley

Stacked Bar Chart With Multiple Label Colors in Tableau

Ollie Linley
Design

Have you ever tried to manually change the label color for different segments of your stacked bar chart? It's really tricky! While Tableau has a default color which can be white, black, or white and black alternating, you can't dictate how that should be attributed, and it can't be edited individually.

Here's a fun workaround that lets you control every aspect of the labels in your stacked bar chart from color to size to anything else! We’ll use a dual axis chart (a Tableau workaround hero!), and a reversed axis.

Build 3 Time-Series KPI's in Tableau From Scratch

Ollie Linley
Design, Tableau KPIs

KPI's are a powerful way to draw our end-users' attention to specific key metrics. By adding in visual information in the form of bar charts, we're able to create a comparison of the current year with the previous year.

While there are numerous ways to show this kind of comparison, here are three easy and effective time-series KPI's that can add an element of visual flair to any dashboard! These bar charts are simple to create and use one or two nifty calculated fields to add the visual flair we’re looking for.

How to Build KPI Tiles in Tableau

Ollie Linley
Design, Tableau KPIs

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are essential for any dashboard, helping you track performance at a glance and make data-driven decisions faster. In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through how to build KPIs in Tableau, from setting up calculated fields to customizing visuals that make your data stand out.

Whether you’re designing a dashboard for executives or optimizing reports for daily tracking, well-designed KPIs can bring clarity and impact. Here’s how to do that in an engaging and eye-catching way!

How to Ace Your Tableau Certification

Ollie Linley
Certification

Tableau’s Certifications aim at testing your theoretical and practical knowledge of Tableau through Multiple Choice Questions. The test is designed to give your CV the stamp it needs to show that you know how to use Tableau, and that you’re confident applying theory to reality.

However, many people feel overwhelmed when studying for these exams. Knowing where to focus your attention when trying to study “the whole of Tableau” is a daunting task!

How to Build a Dashboard on Tableau Public

Ollie Linley
Design, Tableau Public, Tableau Dashboards

If you want to use Tableau for free and don't need to ensure your data is perfectly private, you can use Tableau Public! This free-to-use option is perfect for Tableau newbies, testers, or people working for organizations where expensive Tableau licenses just aren't possible.

In this video, we'll see how to build a dashboard from scratch: from connecting to data, to building worksheets, to adding actions, and finally, to publishing it.

Tableau Table Viz Extension Explained

Ollie Linley
Design, Tableau Text Tables

Tableau text tables are very powerful, but they're also pretty rigid, right? If you're a text table power user and you haven't checked out the Table Viz Extension, drop what you're doing!

A few things you can do with this versatile extension:

  • Create columns of varying widths

  • Add filters to a single column only

  • Dynamically color/format one column at a time

  • Set different mark types for each column Ready to add this to your toolkit?

Check out this video now!

Tableau FIXED LODs Not Filtering (Dimension and Context Filters)

Ollie Linley
Level of Detail

FIXED LODs are wonderful because they allow us to aggregate our measures at a chosen Dimension level, regardless of the level of detail of the worksheet. However, they aren't affected by Dimension Filters, because they're calculated before Dimension Filters are processed.

There are various scenarios where we need to work around that. We'll use Context Filters to help us where we need our LODs to be filtered, and we'll take a look at an example where you might not want your LOD to be filtered by your Dimension Filters.

How to Set Up Data-Driven Alerts in Tableau

Ollie Linley
Tableau Server

Want to learn how to set up alerts on Tableau Cloud/Server so that you can track certain metrics in the dashboards or sheets you're following? All you need is a dashboard published to Tableau Cloud and a measure-based axis.

In this tutorial, we run through how to set up and customize data-driven alerts in Tableau. Data-driven alerts can be scheduled to run at the cadence of your choosing, so it's important to choose your timeframe wisely!

Dynamic Zone Visibility with Tableau Dashboard Actions

Ollie Linley
Dynamic Zone Visibility, Tableau Dashboards

Do you want to show and hide sheets on your dashboard with only a click? Dynamic Zone Visibility lets you do exactly that. This is far more dynamic than filter actions, as we can show or hide any number of sheets and their elements from a single interaction.

There are a few key steps to getting this right, so follow along to see how to implement this into your dashboards too!

How to Set Up Tableau Pulse

Ollie Linley
Tableau Server

Let's take a look at Tableau Pulse!

Tableau Pulse is a new tool available on Tableau Cloud that uses AI to track metrics over time and give you an easily-shareable and digestible snapshot of your data. There are a few quirks to the system that we wanted to walk you through in this week's video. 

How to Publish a Tableau Dashboard

Ollie Linley
Tableau Server

Publishing a Tableau dashboard is crucial part of the dashboard-building process. This is often a step that comes with a sense of accomplishment as we begin sharing our work with others.

But with all the options available to us when we publish our dashboards, how do you know whether you've done it correctly? Will you end-users have adequate access to the data? Do they have the permissions they need to view it? Do we need to add filters or selections?

Tableau Dashboard Filter Actions Explained

Ollie Linley
Tableau Dashboards

Tableau's Dashboard Actions are powerful tools that we can use to add significantly increased levels of interactivity to our dashboards. Interactive dashboards are part of what makes Tableau such an engaging product for our data analysis.

Of all the actions in Tableau, Filter Actions are some of the most common and useful. They allow us to click on one worksheet and filter another, or filter a worksheet on another dashboard entirely!

12 Essential Skills for Every Excel User

Ollie Linley
Excel

Where do you begin with Excel? It's a tool so widely used that everyone assumes you know how to work your way around it! But for those of us just starting out, it can be really intimidating to work out where to begin.

This video will walk you through 12 essential Excel skills that everyone should know, from Beginners to Experts! With these 12 skills, you'll be equipped to get started on your first Excel workbook, or to upgrade the workbook you're working on.

How FIXED Tableau Level of Detail Function Works

Ollie Linley
Level of Detail, Table Calculations

FIXED Level of Detail Functions (LODs) let you specify the level of detail you want to aggregate a particular measure at. This allows us to work around the natural limitations of the level of detail in the worksheet we're working in.

FIXED LODs are a great place to start as they are the definitive, essential LOD. The two others (EXCLUDE and INCLUDE) are less common, but functional in their own unique ways. If you want to simplify and just learn one LOD type, FIXED is the one for you!

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