Month / December 2018

A histogram with an overlaid bell curve
by Konstantin Greger

Jingle Bells – Adding a Normal Distribution to a Histogram in Tableau

It’s the holiday season, so why not amp you your vizzes’ holiday spirit by adding some bell curves to your histograms? Also, I just recently came across this request in a customer meeting and thereby discovered how easy that is to do. The most difficult part is wrapping your head around what a normal distribution is (please resort to Wikipedia for that), how it’s calculated (I literally stole the equation from Wikipedia) and how to translate that into a Calculated Field in Tableau. The rest is a simple dual-axis chart, a parameter and some rather basic Tableau techniques that need your attention.

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by Konstantin Greger

Embedding R Plots in Tableau Dashboards

“R you nuts?” is what my colleague asked me when I once proposed this little hack. He’s not completely wrong, we’ll get to that later…

The task I was presented with was to embed the graphical output from an R package in a Tableau dashboard. Of course it’s possible to run R code from within Tableau Calculated fields, you can read more about it in official Tableau resources here, here, and here and also here on my blog. But part of the game is that there is only one vector of data being returned from the R session via Rserve into a Table Calculation in Tableau. So what about some of the complex graphics R can produce? Sure, you can try to rebuild those natively in Tableau based on the data returned from the code. But what if a) you’re too lazy to do that (and also it’s all just about rapid prototyping something anyways), or b) the visualization is just too complex (think 3D brain models)?

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