What is Datawonders?

Take a look around the net, there are some really great sites dedicated to helping you communicate your data, with any tool, and there are some really cool sites, dedicated to helping you get the edge on your Tableau visuals some of my favourite contributors include:

• The Flerlage Twins
• Johnathon Drummey
• Joe Mako
• Toan Hoang
• Andy Kriebel
• Infectious Data

So how does Datawonders differ? What makes it special?

Well, this is my space for one, but most importantly like the above mentions, and the number of awesome developer sites scattered across the net, I too just want to help you on your Tableau journey, however, I have a very different background to many of the other contributors:

All of my work is centred on creating dashboards that (mostly business) users love to use, I love multi-perspective immersive and interactive dashboards, where collections of charts are brought together to help users understand how that tiny crumb of data impacts the bigger picture.

But, despite working with some fairly large data-sets (in excess of 10 trillion rows and 200+ columns), the one element that is always at the front of my mind when building is: Performance, because lets face it, no matter how great your dashboard is, no user will be happy waiting more than 10 seconds for it to render.

So when I set to work on a new piece, my first five questions tend to be: 

• Where is the data?
• How much data is there, and will I need to build and optimise a new table and or warehouse - not the usual first question most analysts ask
• Who are your audience
• What is the final presentation medium (as much to Tableau's chagrin, static Powerpoint decks are still preferred over Tableau Server)
• What's the story: Are we only presenting static / 1-dimensional data, or are we looking for a more immersive experience?

Bottom line:

Many sites dedicated to Tableau, usually only cover one aspect, how to do that awesome chart.

Datawonders' purpose is different from the many wonderful sites out there: Sure I shall show you the how, but also I will explain the why (or the why not as is sometimes the case), and help you to understand the architecture behind the scenes.

With more than a decade of both using Tableau (September 2008 v4), and teaching Tabelau (June 2010 v5), this site aims to help you, not just learn Tableau basics, but also the architecture, to help you create charts your users will LOVE to use.

Can't get enough visualisation? Me Neither. Check out these other great links for inspiration: