Introduction Welcome to week 29! I’m so excited to be back with another interesting challenge. It occurred to me recently that we’ve been using Sample – Superstore for decades and there is no shortage of date filter tips and tricks but they are all based on traditional Gregorian calendars. And I’ve yet to work with […]
#WOW2026 | Week 29 | Fiscal Fun Read More »
Tableau, Workout Wednesday
Introduction Imagine, your company hired a Chief Happiness Officer (CHO). Their job: keep the office running smoothly. Coffee stocked, ping-pong table used, no-show meetings under control. They ask for a dashboard. Your first instinct? KPI cards. One per metric, previous value, delta, nice arrow. Clean. Visual. The CHO loves it. Until there are more metrics.
2026 Week 28 | Power BI: Redesign a KPI monitor for the CHO Read More »
Power BI, Workout Wednesday
Introduction I’ve been on a mapping kick lately – as input tables make data entry and writeback easier, they come with some pitfalls: misspellings, circular references, and cowboy mapping. Today I want to show you a new strategy for handling mapping effectively in Sigma (sometimes called crosswalk tables by AI) using the new Unnesting feature.
2026 Week 28 | Mapping and Unnesting Read More »
Sigma, Workout Wednesday
Introduction This week we have a challenge by Lisa Hitch, Coach of the New York Data School and Winner of the Tableau Conference Tips Battle. This week we’re putting a fresh spin on a classic chart: the Pareto chart! The Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule) tells us that roughly 80% of outcomes
2026 | Week 28 | Can you build a Pareto Chart with Colored Backgrounds? Read More »
Tableau, Workout Wednesday
Introduction You’ve probably seen the default Power BI tooltip that lists values like Sales, Profit, or Enrollment. While that’s useful, it doesn’t always explain what those numbers mean. Sentence template tooltips let you turn those values into a natural sentence… making your reports easier to understand without creating a custom tooltip page. Where can you
2026 Week 27 | Power BI: Create Smarter Tooltips with Sentence Template Tooltips Read More »
Power BI, Workout Wednesday
Introduction The other day, at the Hokuriku Tableau User Group, I had the opportunity to talk all about trellis charts with a room full of practitioners—covering everything from the basics and handling missing values to the aspect ratio of individual line chart panels, and more.This week’s challenge features trellis charts as its theme once again,
#WOW2026 | Week 27 | Can you build a trellis chart with segment pies? Read More »
Tableau, Workout Wednesday
Introduction Welcome to Week 26 of 2026! We are bringing “Level of Detail” expressions that you might be famililar from other BI tools into Sigma this week! In short, Level of Detail expressions allow you to perform aggregation by specifically defined dimensions that is less granular than the row level, while preserving the overall table
2026 Week 26 | Sigma: Level of Detail Calculations Read More »
Sigma, Workout Wednesday
Introduction This week, we have another new contributor to Workout Wednesday for Power BI: Nabha Ahmed. Give Nabha’s challenge a try! In this challenge, we explore a data visualization technique called a dumbbell chart. A dumbbell chart is used to compare two related values within the same category. It displays both values as points connected
2026 Week 26 | Power BI: Visualizing Affordability Using a Dumbbell Chart Read More »
Power BI, Workout Wednesday
Introduction Tableau 2026.2 added a new Drive Time Area tool to maps, and I couldn’t resist building a challenge around it. You click a spot, drag outward, and Tableau shows how far you can really drive based on actual roads, not a straight line circle. This week, start from Union Station in Washington D.C. and
#WOW2026 | Week 26 | Let’s Try the Drive Time Area Read More »
Tableau, Workout Wednesday
Introduction Some of the most important tasks in a BI implementation are not pretty or fun. One of the tasks that comes up any time I’m pulling in data from sources is how to standardize fields across multiple systems. This is especially tricky when the fields may have been manually input at some point in
2026 Week 25 | Can you standardize your inputs? Read More »
Sigma, Workout Wednesday