Related Posts. How to Create a Venn Diagram in PowerPoint 2010. Venn Diagrams are often used to create intuitive. Play Image Quiz quizzes on Sporcle, the world's largest quiz. This article explains how to create a Venn Diagram in PowerPoint 2010 using shapes and SmartArt. Visual Business Intelligence – Tableau Veers from the Path. I’ve seen it happen many times, but it never ceases to sadden me. An organization starts off with a clear vision and an impervious commitment to excellence, but as it grows, the vision blurs and excellence gets diluted through a series of compromises. Edraw is used as a pyramid diagram software coming with ready-made pyramid diagram templates that make it easy. Software companies are often founded by a few people with a great idea, and their beginnings are magical. They shine as beacons, lighting the way, but as they grow, what was once clear becomes clouded, what was once firm becomes flaccid, and what was once promising becomes just one more example of business as usual. The prominent business intelligence (BI) software companies of today have become too big to easily change course in necessary ways and too focused on quick wins to ever make the sacrifices that would be needed to do so. Once upon a time, however, these companies were vibrant, filled with the exuberance and promise of youth. As they grew, however, it became harder and harder to maintain their original vision. It’s easy for a few people to share an inspiring vision, but it is difficult for that vision to remain pure when the organization grows to 5. The demands of payroll and release schedules make it easier and easier to justify compromises and to chase near- sighted wins. Add to these challenges the demands of taking a company public and the alchemy seldom produces gold. What does this have to do with Tableau? I believe that this wonderful company, which I have uniquely appreciated and respected, is losing the clear vision of its youth. Even though Tableau distinguished itself by a courageous commitment to best practices, which I believe is why it has done so well, it now seems to be competing with the big guys by joining in their folly. Tableau seems to have forsaken the road less travelled of “elegance through simplicity” for the well- trodden super- highway of “more and sexier is better.”Tableau has a special place in my heart. Not long after starting Perceptual Edge, I discovered Tableau in its original release and wrote the first independent review of Tableau 1. I was thrilled, for in Tableau I found a BI software company that shared my vision of visual data exploration and analysis done well. Since then I’ve used Tableau, along with Spotfire, Panopticon, and SAS JMP, to illustrate good data visualization functionality in my courses and lectures. Until recently, I assumed that Tableau, of all these vendors, would be the one mostly likely to continue its tenacious commitment to best practices. However, what I’ve seen in Tableau 8, due to be released soon, has broken my heart. Tableau is now introducing visualizations that are analytically impoverished. Tableau’s vision has become blurred. I recently received an email promoting the merits of Tableau 8. It included a link to more information, and when I clicked on it, this is what I read: “Crave More Bling?” I couldn’t believe my eyes. Could I have clicked on a link to SAP Business Objects by mistake? This is not the Tableau that I know and respect. As it turns out, someone in the Tableau’s Marketing Department thought twice about the term “bling” and removed it before my screams reached Seattle, but in truth, whoever called this bling was just being honest; some of the items in this list of new visualizations are nothing but fluff. I won’t write a full review of Tableau 8 here. Despite the problems that I’m focusing on, this version of the software includes many worthwhile and well- designed features. For the time being, it will remain one of the best visual data exploration and analysis tools on the market, but I’m concerned that its current direction does not bode well for Tableau’s future. To express my concern, I’ll focus primarily on three new visualizations that are being added in Tableau 8 and why, in two cases, they should have never been added and, in one case, how its design fails in a fundamental way. Word Clouds. Back in 2. Marti Hearst, who teaches information visualization and search technologies at U. C. Berkeley, wrote a guest article for my newsletter about word clouds. In the article, Marti described some of the fundamental flaws of word clouds, which she referred to in the article as tag clouds, because these visualizations were always based on HTML tags at the time. I was confused about tag clouds in part because they are clearly problematic from a perceptual cognition point of view. For one thing, there is no visual flow to the layout. Graphic designers, as well as painters of landscapes, know that a good visual design guides the eye through the work, providing an intuitive starting point and visual cues that gently suggest a visual path. By contrast, with tag clouds, the eye zigs and zags across the view, coming to rest on a large tag, flitting away again in an erratic direction until it finds another large tag, with perhaps a quick glance at a medium- sized tag along the way. Small tags are little more than annoying speed bumps along the path. In most visualizations, physical proximity is an important visual cue to indicate meaningful relationships. But in a tag cloud, tags that are semantically similar do not necessarily occur near one another, because the tags are organized in alphabetical order. Furthermore, if the paragraph is resized, then the locations of tags re- arrange. If tag A was above B initially, after resizing, they might end up on the same line but far apart. Tag clouds also make it difficult to see which topics appear in a set of tags. For example, in the image below, it’s hard to see which operating systems are talked about versus which ones are omitted. Intuitively, to me, it seemed that an ordinary word list would be better for getting the gist of a set of tags because it would be more readable. Since Marti wrote this article, what was once reserved for HTML tags has become a popular way to display words from many contexts, such as books and speeches. Here’s a word cloud that Tableau is currently featuring on its website to showcase this new addition to Tableau 8: What this tells me is that the candidates said the following words quite a bit: “people,” “going,” “governor,” “president,” “government,” “we’ve,” “make,” “more,” along with a few others that are legible. These individual words without context are not very enlightening. Combining a word cloud with filters gives it an appearance of analytical usefulness, but the appearance is deceiving. A word cloud is as useful for data analysis and presentation as a cheap umbrella is for staying dry in a hurricane. Assuming that an analysis of these words in isolation from their context is useful, a horizontal bar graph would have displayed them far better. Bars would provide what the word cloud cannot, a relative representation of the values in a way that our brains can perceive. Words differ in length, so in a word cloud a long word that was spoken 1. You might wonder, “What if there are too many words for a horizontal bar graph?” In that case, another one of Tableau’s new visualizations—a treemap—could handle the job more effectively. More about treemaps later. Word clouds are fun, but they lack analytical merit. When did Tableau, which was originally developed for visual analysis, become a tool for creating impoverished infographics? Did they add this feature to satisfy one of their prominent UK customers, the Guardian? Whatever the reason, with the addition of word clouds, how many of Tableau’s customers will waste their time trying to analyze data using this ineffective form of display? Packed Bubbles. Bubbles have their place in the lexicon of visual language, but only when encoding values using the sizes of circles is the best choice available because the most effective means—2- D position (e.
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