My first Tableau dashboard

After a lot googling and putting data into the right format, I was able to craft my first Tableau dashboard.  

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My first Visualization with Tableau

It has been a good week for me. I have pushed myself to learn Tableau within the shortest time and get things working.

I was asked to a site level data analysis for specific HIV care and treatment Indicators. The data was from an Access database application. I first had to split the database to get to the back end of the database. The second and major headache was to get the data in the right format that Tableau will accept. I used Excel to transpose the data to a format that Tableau accepts.

I loaded the data and started getting my hands dirty with tableau. Eventually, I was able to come up with this 

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A not so gentle introduction to Tableau

It is my second week at my new work place. I am liking the place.It has been a hectic two weeks. The Introductions, orientations and all.

And now comes the time to settle down...and then the data, and of course the request that comes with it. OK, that is not a big deal, let me see the data. And what do you use here for data analysis?

"Tableau"

Whaaaaaat? What is Tableau? I ask. A tablet? a book?

"Tableau is a data analysis software", I am informed. "And that is what we use here for data analysis. That is what you will be using".

I slump on my desk, just like my son usually does when he is told to do something he does not like. He picked it from Sponge bob square pants. Well, that said, there are no pants here,I realize that I don't have all the time to whine, I'd better get myself started with this Tableau monster. So first, I head to Mr. google and google what this Tableau.

I find out that Tableau is a BI software more so like others BI tools I have used elsewhere: Actuate, SAP Crystal Reports, SQL Server BI stack, Pentaho, Jasper Reports and of course the master - Excel. I come to also realize that it is highly regarded and is among the top BI tools as per this Gartner report. It is placed on top, ahead of many "Big" players in the data analytics field. They are placed above Qlik View, SAP, IBM, Micro strategy and even Microsoft itself. (not that I feel they are the best, but I have been using Microsoft BI software for some time now. You can download the report here

Ok, so i started to have some respect to this Software and the company. I spend my better part of the afternoon hearing more about it and eventually downloaded the free version - Tableau Public before I could get my licensed version. The license can cause an arm and a leg, especially for Africa and Middle east countries.
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Excel sparklines; a trending wonder in cell

Microsoft Excel never ceases to amaze. There are many tools in excel that the novice information user can be empowered to use and make sense of their data. From Excel 2010, Microsoft introduced a tiny little wonder called sparklines. Sparklines are tiny charts  that can be embedded on a  worksheet cell to provide visual representation of data. Sparklines provides trends visualization on a single cell from a series of values, such as sales over a period of time.

Creating sparklines are pretty easy. You just select the cells with the data that you want to display the trend, then from the Excel menu, choose Insert. Under the Sparkline ribbon, choose the type of sparkline that you want to use to visualize your data. There are three options; line, column and win-loss chart. The line is pretty much straight forward and easy to understand. You then specify the cell that you want your sparkline display. The best practice is to show the visualization next to the data - the last cell after the data on the same row.

You can format your sparklines as per your taste. You can modify the size of the trend line or the color. But what i like the most is to format the sparkline to assist the user to visualize data. This can be achieved by adding points of interest in the sparklines. Under the show tab, you can format your sparkline to show the highests point, the lowest, negative points, the first or the last point. You can add tick marks that show trends over the periods in your dataset. To format your sparkline, select the sparkline to reveal the Design Tab.

For what I do, I created sparklines to help program managers to see the trends of new HIV infections from the districts that they work in; in addition to several HIV care and treatment indicators that needed to be tracked over time. As shown below.

From this visualization, one can see at a glance that an Indicator that is cumulative (incremental) has a problem if the sparkline is not showing a continued upward trend as shown below.

This is another reason why Excel is usually called the king of Business Intelligence