Joe Beaven

Joe was introduced to Tableau by The Information Lab at a careers event just before graduating with a BA in Earth Sciences from the University of Cambridge. He then became familiar with geospatial data in his first role after university working at the UK Hydrographic Office, the government office for maritime data. Working in a highly visual space encouraged Joe to become more involved with data visualisation, developing his Tableau skills in his spare time. He is looking forward to applying data analytics in areas of previous experience such as across the Energy and Marine sectors.

Blog Posts

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Thu 21 Nov 2019 | Joe Beaven
One-year-on Part III: US Population Change
Last week I wrote about my ideas on redesigning my second ever viz on the cost of beer at MLB games. The original looked like this… This was my redesigned viz… https://public.tableau.com/profile/joe
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Thu 21 Nov 2019 | Joe Beaven
Reflections on The Data School
So today is our penultimate day at The Data School and we’ve been asked to reflect on our time in training. Overall, I can’t believe how quickly it’s gone by and it will be strange not coming into the office everyday with the rest of DS16 now that we are going our separate ways for placement
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Tue 12 Nov 2019 | Joe Beaven
One-year-on Part II: Cost of Beer at MLB Grounds
So I finally got round to redesigning my first ever viz on Tableau Public. Using Makeover Monday’s dataset on Women in the House of Representatives I went from this (published 15th October 2018)… to this… https://public.tableau.com/profile/joe
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Wed 30 Oct 2019 | Joe Beaven
One-year-on Part I: Women in the House of Representatives
Two weeks ago marked one year since I posted my first Viz to Tableau Public. Looking back over my old work, I always think ‘this could have been more insightful’; ‘this could have used something I’ve learnt since’ or ‘what was I even thinking?!’. So, I decided to reviz my old work ‘one-year-on’
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Tue 29 Oct 2019 | Joe Beaven
Layout Containers - how to get your Item Hierarchy under control
Tableau’s Layout Containers are not always the most intuitive, and I am probably not the only person who has simply dragged worksheets onto a dashboard until they look about right. The problem with this comes later on when trying to align worksheets or bring more worksheets onto the view
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Thu 24 Oct 2019 | Joe Beaven
Dashboard Week #4: Unwanted Call data (+ Power BI)
Today’s challenge was different from the first three days of Dashboard Week in two ways. 1. We had to use Tableau Prep over Alteryx, 2. We were not allowed to use Tableau Desktop as our visualisation tool
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Wed 23 Oct 2019 | Joe Beaven
Dashboard Week #3: Indian Electricity Network
Today we were tasked to download data from Harvard Dataverse on electricity in India. The data was survey based (again). Respondents were asked about their energy source, their perceptions to energy use as well as background such as employment and where they lived
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Tue 22 Oct 2019 | Joe Beaven
Dashboard Week #2: Web Scraping the Rules of Parliament
Today’s challenge was based on Rules of Parliament and involved getting data from ParlRulesData.org. The only problem was, we weren’t allowed to download any data. Instead, all the information we needed had to be scraped from the website directly. Getting the data: The ParlRulesData
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Mon 21 Oct 2019 | Joe Beaven
Dashboard Week #1: Survey Data
This week is the infamous Dashboard Week for DS16. Every day this week we will be given data at the start of the data
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Tue 15 Oct 2019 | Joe Beaven
Include a row outside of your Top N when mark is selected on a different sheet
Due to limited space on dashboards, charts with many marks are often cut down to a view which shows the Top 10 or 20 marks. Sometimes we might want to investigate a mark outside of the Top N and see this included on our view
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Mon 14 Oct 2019 | Joe Beaven
Drilldown into data (with formatting and tooltip tricks)
Often on a dashboard in Tableau there is not enough space to display all the levels of detail in your dataset. Users will also prefer to see a less granular level of detail before looking into what is driving the trends by investigating the underlying data
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Wed 25 Sep 2019 | Joe Beaven
Chained Analytical Apps
As outlined in Matthew Armstrong’s blog ‘Alteryx Basics: Analytical Apps ‘, Alteryx Apps provide users a way to quickly run workflows without loading Alteryx Designer. They also offer flexibility in the output of a workflow by building in User Interface tools
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Mon 23 Sep 2019 | Joe Beaven
Site Roles in Tableau Server
On Tableau Server, there are two main ways to limit content available to certain users. These are through Permissions (which Charlie Scammell has written about) or alternatively through Site Roles, the focus of this blog
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Mon 09 Sep 2019 | Joe Beaven
Reflections on Iron Viz
On Monday, we had our brief from Carl that we were all to create an entry for the Iron Viz competition. The data provided was on the origin, religion and settling city of refugees coming to the US. We were free to add any relevant data to our viz
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Sat 31 Aug 2019 | Joe Beaven
Tableau File Formats
When saving work from Tableau, just like Excel, there are a lot of file types to choose from. Up until today, I had mainly taken a guess at which option to go for so I was interested to talk through the differences on Tuesday
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Fri 16 Aug 2019 | Joe Beaven
Tableau Time Saving Tip #2: Format all charts on a dashboard
Ever built up some views quickly without giving much thought to the text formatting? By the time you come to finish up your dashboard, there are Dashboard Titles, Worksheet Titles, Textboxes, BAN’s, Axes, Labels and Tooltips all needing to be re-formatted
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Fri 16 Aug 2019 | Joe Beaven
Using a row in a Datasource as a reference line
Some Datasources contain a row which is a natural reference line. An example of this came in my first weekly project last Friday where I looked at diversity in Tech companies. There was a row for each company, with column’s for company gender balance and proportion employees by race
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Mon 12 Aug 2019 | Joe Beaven
Allow user to change which Measure is displayed on a worksheet
Ever had a data source where each column is showing a similar metric that you would like the user to be able to switch between? I faced this revisiting an early Makeover Monday on diversity in US tech companies for my first weekly project at the DS
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Thu 08 Aug 2019 | Joe Beaven
Tableau Time Saving Tip #1: Default Properties of Measures
On Wednesday, we had our first day using Tableau at The Data School. Going right back to basics allowed me to see some of the things that I had missed whilst teaching myself Tableau over the past year. I learnt a few things which would have saved me so much time making vizzes
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Tue 06 Aug 2019 | Joe Beaven
Expectations of The Data School
Hi everyone! My name is Joe and I am one of the latest cohort to join the data school. My background is in the Energy and Maritime sectors with a degree in Earth Sciences
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