Meet & Greet events at the Data School are a great way for prospective applicants to learn more about the work at the School. At the most recent event, I volunteered to demonstrate some of the capabilities of Tableau. The experience was also a chance for me to improve my public speaking skills.
Tableau tips and where to find data sets
From speaking to potential applicants, I found that a common question was in relation to the choice of the data set for the application Viz. My best advice would be to select a data set that is most appealing to you and that would motivate you to spend time analysing for insightful observations.
Two great resources that I found and used for the event were from
There are many Youtube videos that can help improve your understanding of Tableau. I recommend this video, which is a contest (on the most tips in a set amount of time) between Tableau Zen Masters Andy Kriebel and Jeffrey Shaffer. There is also a very informative recording from Tableau Conference Europe 2019 on Viz in Tooltips. I have attached the link here.
Zoom in feature on Viz in Tooltips
During the Meet & Greet event, I presented a Viz in Tooltip that provide a more granular view of the average price of Airbnb listings around a selected location. Below is an example of the Viz in Tooltip:
Ideally, it would be better to visualise listing prices by suburb. However, I did not have geographic information to filter by Sydney suburb names. So, I instead filtered the tooltip view by the rounded value of individual coordinates. Here is an example of the calculation in Tableau:
I then insert the rounded values for latitude and longitude into the filter in the Viz in Tooltip:
With this last step, I would be able to visualise the distribution of prices around a particular Airbnb listing. I hope that this blog post was useful for current and future applicants. Good luck to all applicants and have fun creating your application Viz!
