Friday 24 October 2014

Leaking the Zen Master Email

Blowing the whistle on the Tableau Zen Masters




Ok, this blog post might not be up for very long once The Man sees it and takes it down, forcing me to go into hiding in some embassy somewhere. But while i can I am going to let you into a little secret. I'm going to blow the whistle on the most highly respected group of people in the Tableau community. I'm going to reveal something they don't want you to know. Something that will change the way you think of them forever. I am talking about....


The Tableau Zen Masters.


This group of Tableau users are seen as the masters of Tableau. The perception is that they know everything about it, the experts expert. Well I am gonna shatter that illusion for you right now. They are just normal people, and they don't know everything. 

It started with this email to the Zens....


to Zens

Hi Guys,Quick poll, & be honest. Who knew you could pan a map by holding down the left mouse button in one place for a couple of seconds and then move to pan the map?I have always used the shift key to pan, somebody in a training session has just taught me the left button hold & pan. 
       
I was amazed, I mean, a zen knows everything right. Maybe this was a one off, surely it wasn't a common thing? Well, the replies just kept on coming. 


That was the first way I learned it.  It was six months after that that I learned about the shift key.  Sounds like one of those – “Well how about that?!?!?” moments.  Love it -        


Then...

         via bounce.secureserver.net 




to       ,        ,          .Zens

I've always done it that way, but only learnt the shift key thing yesterday!

and...


              @                 .com





to             Zens

Have always known left mouse button and hold,  I've known about the shift key for five minutes now. 

and...


to       , Zens 
Nice :)

I will always remeber when a new user taught me that the "Show Me" button locks relative table calcs (this was most useful before we had Automatic sorting for the advanced table calc dialog)

Can I take this opportunity to ask a seemingly simple question: How do you connect to a Saved Data Source in 8.2 from within an existing workbook?

I have so far only seen the list of Saved Data Sources when creating a new workbook, and not after clicking the Data->Connect to Data menu option.

--
           


               



to zens

@       - The saved connections have moved to the Home tab in the upper right:
 Inline image 1
However, my muscle memory still goes to the data tab.
@       - I've known about click+hold+pan since maybe my first month of using Tableau. I didn't know about shift+click+pan until just now, tho.
and still they kept emailing...

                 @        .com 

to        ,         Zens 
Ditto here after all those who said they knew about hold and pan but just learned about Shift.
Regards,
              
Sr. Data Consultant |Tableau Accredited Trainer | 


             

to zens 
This is the first I’ve heard about using the shift key.  I’ve only ever known click+hold.


So there you have it, evidence that the Zen Masters are human, just like everyone else. They don't know absolutely everything, they learn from everyone else. And that is the point of this blog post. The Zens are just a group of normal people, they don't know everything about Tableau and are constantly learning from everyone else. What makes them Zen is not an encyclopaedic knowledge of Tableau but the willingness to share that knowledge with everyone in the Tableau community. Some are experts in design, some in mapping, some in table calculations,others know exactly how tableau functions under the hood What they all have in common is a desire to help all Tableau users achieve that same level of understanding, enjoyment and passion that they have. To achieve Tableau enlightenment.

And thats what being a Zen is all about. 

Wednesday 8 October 2014

Using Parameters to search a free text field



One of the pet hates of anyone working in data is that dreaded free text field. You know the one, every system has one. That little white box that just invites the user to enter what ever little collection of text they want to add. In an ideal world all data entry would be a drop down box or a selection of phrases so that you could do some data analysis on it. However, thats a dream world, full of fluffy clouds, endless summer days and cool drinks on a warm beach. In reality we have records in databases that are strings of text that contain useful data if only we could group it together.

I was asked at work this week if I could provide some analysis on a free text field. At the Welcome Trust Sanger Institute we have a large DNA Sequencing facility that produces huge amounts of data. This data is produced by running DNA samples on a number of Illumina DNA Sequencers, each run takes about 5 days and produces the equivalent of 100 peoples genomes. Each run gets QC'd by a real life person who will annotate some runs if there are interesting things to note. This annotation is a free text field that we would like to be able to use to monitor for potential problems. So heres how i did it. 

First we need a parameter to act as our search entry. We create a parameter and change the data type to string and set the allowable values to all. Leave the current value blank.


Next we create a calculated field based on the parameter, this will then allow us to use the results of the search to filter our data. 

In my data set the text is in the [lane_annotation] field so we create a calculation using the CONTAINS(string1,string2) function. What this does is search through the first field, string1, looking for the text in string2. Bit like searching for text in a text editor. If it find a match then it will return true or if not false. In my case i am searching the [lane_annotation] field looking for text entered in the [Parameters].[Annotation Search]. If it matches it will return "Annotation" and if not "None"

Next i build my viz.

So we have the number of lanes that have been QC'd each month since 2011. So now we can use the calculated field we created earlier and place it on the colour shelf. 

So now we can see the number of lanes with and without annotations. This is useful as it shows that a spike in the number of annotations might just be due to an overall increase in lane throughput. This is using just the calculated field, we've not used the search parameter yet.

Now add the parameter control to the viz and we can search for something eg "uneven"


Now the search string in the parameter is being passed to the calculated field and gets evaluated. All the 6000 or so records are checked and those that contain the word "uneven" are tagged with the "Annotation" flag. We now we have a line chart that shows the occurance of the word "uneven" in the [lane_annotation] field

I then decided to add a second field and look at the % of total


To finish it off i added it to a dashboard along with a detailed view of each lane and annotation and used a dashboard action to filter the results. So now we have a little search tool that we can use to go back through a couple of years worth of data, looking for text in a free text field and look for potential issues.

I've already used this twice this week already so hopefully you might find this useful for getting information out of your free text fields.


 
biz.