Creating Bespoke Data Visualisations in Tableau - Part One

Let us start by understanding the objectives in this course, the various sections and how to optimise your learning. More importantly, you will get to know a little more about your instructor and the reason for this courses existence.

We will talk about the nature of bespoke data visualisations, what they are, and how we can achieve these in Tableau.

We will talk about the reasons for learning more about bespoke data visualisations and how, through learning about bespoke data visualisations, you will improve your Tableau dashboarding skills.

There is some contention and disagreements about the use of bespoke data visualisations, and we will discuss the pros and cons of bespoke data visualisations, when to use them, and more importantly, when not to use them.

This course is not just about creating cool things; although you will create some awesome stuff. However, it is about going through the process of learning various techniques, and to be able to apply them to your own creativity.

In this section, we are going to cover all the core Tableau techniques required to create Bespoke Data Visualisations.

In this lecture, we are going to look at Table Calculations and the INDEX() Function. When creating Bespoke Data Visualisations, this is perhaps the single most important function to know as it will be key to our calculations. There are very few Dashboards that I have built that does not feature this versatile Table Calculation.

In this lecture, we are going to look at the following Table Calculations: WINDOW_SUM(), WINDOWS_MIN() and WINDOWS_MAX(); Knowledge of these are essential for building bespoke data visualisations.

In this lecture, we are going to look into the technique of Data Densification; this technique allows us to take two points and create additional points between for manipulation, so in essence, making our data more dense.

In this lecture, we are going to build our first, albeit simple, bespoke data visualisation to get a better understanding of Data Densification and Table Calculations. We will be building a Shaped Bar Chart which is a nice alternative to your standard Bar Chart.

In this lecture, we are going to look into the drawing curved lines using the SIN() Function. We will using Data Densification, Table Calculations and the SIN() function to draw this data visualisation. This lecture will help cement our knowledge on the techniques presented.

In this lecture, we will be looking at using Data Densification, Table Calculations and the Polygon Mark Type to draw shapes. We will combine all our techniques to draw a few fun shapes and will be building up to drawing more complex objects.

In this lecture, we will be reinforcing our knowledge on our learned techniques to create a Packed Circle Chart in Tableau. We will be drawing circles and sizing them based on our data set.

In this video, we will be creating a Radial Bar Chart in Tableau. We will be using Data Densification and leveraging various Table Calculations in our bespoke data visualisation.

We have now learned quite a lot and practice does make perfect. Please follow the links below and complete the various exercises to reinforce your knowledge and learned techniques.

We have covered a lot of grounds and have learned some of the available core techniques that we require to build bespoke data visualisations. So let us review.

In this section, we will talk about finding inspiration, sketching and designing your Bespoke Data Visualisations in Tableau.

We are going to talk about the various sources of inspiration that is at your disposal. You can find inspiration anywhere you look, you just have to pay attention, be aware, be open and let it come to you.

Once you have found some inspiration, we will go through the process of distilling this down to its fundamental parts. We will work on pen and paper, go through my process, and start sketching out our various possibilities for our bespoke data visualisation.

The final step is choose and sketch out our bespoke data visualisation; this will give us our basis for our Tableau design and build using the techniques we have learned so far.

A lot of people look at a visualisation and think that they can never build it, however, this could not be further from the truth. Once you see a data visualisation, you can distil, sketch and design a bespoke visualisation that can be built in Tableau.

We are going to explore a Sunburst Chart. We will look at when could it be used, what use cases could it be appropriate for and, more importantly, when not to use it.

We will prepare our data source for our Sunburst chart by taking into account Data Densification technique. We will also go into how we can make this as flexible as possible, especially as we may want to use this in our production dashboards.

Using our prepared data source, we are going to draw our the first segments of our Sunburst chart so that we have a basic understanding of the mechanics. This is always the important first step as we will very quickly see if this is going to be fit for purpose.

We are going to complete our first layer of our Sunburst using additional Table Calculations to position our segments around the circle. We will need to move our segments around and make sure they are relative to each other.

We will now add our second layer to our Sunburst which will complete our bespoke data visualisation from a functional point of view. Once we have our second layer, we can add additional layers through manipulating our data source.

Now that we have our Sunburst completed, we will look into adding our final touches and work on additional cosmetics to ensure that we have a very nice look at feel to our bespoke data visualisation.

That must have felt like a mini marathon, but alas we are done and will now do a review of the end-to-end design, data preparation, and build of our Sunburst Bespoke Data Visualisation.

Where there is a beginner there is an end, and I am thankful that you have made it this far, and hopefully you have learned a lot from this course. We are going to go review the entire course and talk about our journey.

Check out the following tutorials for you to get through. Given you have come all this way and completed the course, you will be in a better place to understand how these bespoke data visualisations work, and hopefully, they will spark off your imagination.

While I have trained thousands of people in person, this is my first Tableau Course on Udemy. I hope that you have enjoyed it and I do hope that you keep in touch and let me know about your progress. Do reach out and connect with me on my various platforms.