BI: Lessons Learned

After a many month hiatus due to a new job, I was excited to get back into Tableau. There were some challenges and revelations. Below are my observations. ·          I was excited that I still remembered key pieces and was not as slow as I when I was first learning ·           Pick a topic you are passionate abou t (either if you are getting back into the game or starting to learn).   My choice of a dog rescue site that I am very enthusiastic about helped me to wrap my brain around the data as well as have the desire to make a difference. ·          Be patient , use your resources and step away.   Because my head has been doing something very different these past few months, it took a little bit to tweak my thought process into the formulas and how Tableau works; exercise patience.    -     I still am constantly ama...

As I did some soul searching these past few years, I found myself evaluating what motivates me to wake up every day and enjoy going to work.   I found those priorities to be;  continuing to have the independence of a consultant   working in an industry that is doing something significant to affect the lives of others (to me that is/was Higher Education) working for a company that is forward thinking/moving (think Software as a Service) I have thoroughly enjoyed working in the BI/Analytics space these past 14 years but sometimes you need to take a little jibe to get to get your boat headed in the right direction. For now, I will learn the software and hope to land back in the analytics space with my new company as they are doing great things and just developing their presence in the higher ed and analytics space.   From what I have seen with their software, they will do great things with Analytics and I hope to be part of that exciting direction!

  Well this week I am keeping it simple because of some other commitments. For week 17, I had two pieces of information that I scratched my head about. The first is something that is key as a data analyst.. to pivot your data. Tableau loves data to be nicely organized into rows. This is the data as delivered from Data World.  As you can see the data has many columns for each of the 'categories' of popcorn.  This makes the data difficult to work with as columns in tableau.  So, typically we will pivot the data so it is in rows.  In the example below, this is the end result we wanted to reach. Each team has a category and score assigned.   To get there all we had to do was  1.go to your data tab 2.select (Control + left mouse click) the rows we wanted to pivot 3.Right Click 4.Pivot Data wala! The last thing that I got stuck on was I was doing a dual axis chart and I couldn't get the data to present itself right.  I ...