It seems like I’ve been hearing and seeing more ads on “invest in gold during inflationary times.” Like almost any strong statement I hear, my brain does not go to “I should do that!”, but rather, “is that true?”

So, I thought I should set out to answer the question. Looking at these investment questions always reminds me of why so many smart people don’t self-direct their own savings. It is so much more complicated than it needs to be!

This is the first of a 52-week project to answer one question a week with Tableau. I will do my best to make each question as generically applicable to as wide of an audience as possible. Some weeks will be personal, like this one!

For this week, I was curious to see how far I walked in 2023 compared to 2022. I did not set a goal to walk further in 2023 and really had no idea how it compared. The answer was a bit depressing!

I’m thoroughly addicted to Formula 1. I’m ok to admit it, the blame can be placed squarely at the feet of Netflix’s Drive to Survive.

To make tracking the F1 season even more fun, I thought why not follow standings in a fun and interactive way. Also, I’m a sucker for bar chart races even though they are rarely useful. Ditto using symbols on a map.

Tableau Conference has come and gone. Now we need to be a little more creative to connect with our #DataFam until next May.

It is often recommended to improve our vizzing skills by participating in community challenges. There are many available:

The first month of the 2022 MLB season is in the books. While fans are excited to have baseball after an offseason of indecision and uncertainty, fans are also confused as to why the offense is down. After changes to the collective bargaining agreement between the players association and the commissioner’s office, fans and players were optimistic about a more exciting product of Major League Baseball.

The upcoming Formula 1 season is set to take off this Friday, March 18, 2022. This is a huge year for F1 as the new regulations have come into effect and have made the cars vastly different. I wanted to look back at how regulations have changed racing over the years. I chose to compare the track times over the years at the Monaco Grand Prix. As the track has changed very little in the last 70 years, I thought it would make for easy analysis.

So here we are!  Two years into a pandemic that has been difficult and trying and at times unrelenting. We are lucky for the most part to be involved in technology and able to adapt to a virtual ‘work from home’ atmosphere. But even then we are tired of the Zoom calls.

In the virtual world, we can glean a lot of benefits from not having to do everything face to face. For starters, time that we previously spent commuting to work can now be spent on any number of self-care tasks - exercise, more time with family, etc. The drawback to this new virtual world is the daily social contact that was so integrated into our lives before the pandemic.

On October 5, Katie Wagner asked this question on Twitter. It made me realize that I’ve been meaning to write a blog on this topic for months! After all, I’ve been working within teams of smart people to get to the root of this question for 20 years.

One of my favourite hobbies is analyzing my investments.  For me, it is not about the money, although that is a nice boost. It is more about the sheer enjoyment of looking at the numbers and finding a quality investment that I can trust for the long term.

Tableau Conference(ish) is quickly approaching and ‘tis the season where we all get excited about the possibilities Tableau can offer through better analytics and thus better decisions. The question that always results is, ‘How do I take all this awesome information and apply it in my day to day life?’ The answer is usually time and patience but here are my three key priorities in helping companies transition to Tableau from (usually) Excel.

I am about to embark on my second Tableau conference and I am getting nervous.  The stakes are high - this is my second conference so I can’t just say I am a newbie.  I have been there before and I have a few tricks under my belt. Although, since we are switching venues, avoid escalators cannot be one of them… I’m looking at you, New Orleans Convention Center.

This is my first blog and I felt inspired to ‘take the plunge’ - so to speak - because I love dashboard actions! Dashboard actions can be very useful to filter views, highlight points, and so much more. I am such a big fan of dashboard actions because I think it helps the end user to better interact with the data and give them more than just a static visualization. More recently, Tableau has added more dashboard actions which has improved the end users’ ability to interact with the data.