Who's up for some golf

   Myrtle Beach, South Carolina is our home and if it wasn't already a cool place being the self proclaimed "Golf Capital of the World" (read the Golf Channels idea of the Golf capital of the US here) would make it even cooler right?  That is if you're a golfer, and unfortunately were not golfers.  

   But, not only are they like 90+ golf courses, there are a bunch, and I mean a bunch of mini/adventure golf courses around here and who doesn't like to play mini golf?  I have a 9yr old son, so you know we're playing mini golf every chance we get.  

  In a quick Google and Bing map search I was able to find at least 20 mini golf courses in Myrtle Beach, and that's not including North Mrytle, and to the south in Surfside and Murrells Inlet.  I must say the mini course to square mile ratio has to be some kind of record, and you could probably call Myrtle Beach the Mini Golf capital of the world too.

  With so many mini-golf course around, we thought it would be cool to keep our scorecard and pencils from each of the courses that we played in a scrap book.  I thought to myself, a scrap book is cool, and since Tableau can map things, I think it might be cool to put together a little dashboard where can update on the map which courses we've played.  

  Sounds easy right?  I mean how hard can mapping our mini golf course be right?  Technically it's not, but there isn't like a master list of all the mini golf courses around, so I had to gather the data (names, addresses, etc) manually, which again isn't a big deal, just a little more time consuming than I'd liked, but I got it.  At least I got a good portion of the courses documented.  I even went as far as to geocode each of the address, and include the latitude and longitude in my data, overkill right?  probably, but since I was manually adding the address, I thought I might as well geocode them.  I've been using GPS Visulizer for sometime now, actually use it less since I have Tableau, but I does serve a purpose.  You can do all sorts of things with maps on this site,  but I digress, I'm writing about Mini Golf.

  Now that I have my data in Excel, I can build a dashboard. This was the easy part.  Drop in my latitude and longitude, but in a cool golf ball on a tee shape, and color them to represent Green as played and Red as not played, but it was missing something, I couldn't just leave it as a map, I needed to add something else.  So I added in a little beachy imaginary, and called it a day.  

   It serves our purposes for our own personal tracking, and as time goes on, the list will grow, and one day there will be a master list of Mini golf courses not only in Myrtle Beach, but in the Grand Strand :-)

Check out my viz after the break.

Thanks,

Todd

Lets look at insurance claims

Hey there!  It's been a little while since my last blog, but I've been busy moving to Myrtle Beach, SC. We've been here for a couple of weeks, and we're getting settled in.  I took a week off work during our first week here, and things are starting to get back to normal with my going back to work..well going back to work when you work at home just means getting up earlier, and doing work work.

Since I've moved to Myrtle Beach, I wanted to join a Tableau User Group (TUG), as before I left Ohio, the Columbus TUG has an Iron Viz Competition that I missed, but was really interested in participating in, so I looked and there weren't any close, so I've started a new Myrtle Beach TUG and now seeing members to join.  If you're in the area and want to join me, the Group page is here:  http://community.tableausoftware.com/groups/myrtle-beach

Anyway, one of my first dashboards I posted on my Tableau Public site was an Claims dashboard. At the time I wasn't writing blogs, and it's gotten like 20 hits (most of them are probably me), so I thought I'd talk about it a little bit, since I haven't had a lot of time to create something new (I have some ideas for new viz's).

In my day job, in working with insurance, we handle claims for our clients.  For the privacy, those clients have been changed, but this viz breaks down the claims to many different views from one of our Servicing Centers down to a by state, and by client view.  The map is my favorite piece of this as it really gives you that visualization of where the claims are.

I think this is a pretty straight forward dashboard, in that there really isn't anything tricky going on.  There are a couple Dashboard Actions that allow you to filter based on the State or the Cause of loss, and 3 quick filters to allow you to get down to a finer level of detail.   My Operations folks like the tooltip, as it keeps the viz simple and clean, but with a quick hover, they can get more details.

The real world version of this is much larger (many more pages, and views, with over 12 million records), resides on our Tableau server and is updated every morning with the previous days work.  It's very beneficial to our Operations  team as they can quickly see how they are doing.

I hope you find this viz interesting, and I hope to have something fun in the near future.

Until next time,

Todd

Learn About Tableau

Road Trip Song Count Estimator Viz

After I left #Data14 last week I had a lot of my mind as I headed back home to Ohio.  A lot of great information was presented at the conference, but also,  my family was on my mind.  We're in the process of moving from Ohio to South Carolina, so as I travelled back to Ohio from Seattle, I was thinking more about the traveling that I had ahead of me...I was driving to the Carolina for the weekend, by car.

I got home Thursday night at a little before midnight, and latterly unpacked my bag, to repack it with fresh cloth, share the gifts that I've brought back with my 9 year old son,  and go to bed to get up early to start the 10 hour road trip to my mother-in-law's in North Carolina.

We've made this trip many times in the last 8 years, so my son is pretty used to it so we don't get a lot of the "Are we there yet" questions, as he knows the land marks by now.  But this trip was a little different, he was more antsy about seeing he Mamaw who he hasn't seen since December so he asked a few times "Are we almost there?", which we were.  We we're like an hour away so I did a little calculation in my head and presented him with a task to keep him occupied.  The task,  a count down of songs.  We were listening to the 90's on 9 on Sirrus/XM so I estimated an average song length of 4 minutes, and we had roughly 80 miles left so I guessed it would be about 20 songs before we arrived.

He started counting songs, and we got closer and closer and it basically gave him some sense of a light at the end of the tunnel.  We arrived and parked the car as the 19th song ended.  Needless to say, he was impressed.

So, with that idea.  I decided I would attempt to put together a Viz, that really made it more scientific, rather than my best guess, since we listen to different music and being a DJ, I know that different era's of music has different average song length.

The average song length is the only data in this Viz, which I found online doing a search for average song length by decade.  The rest of the Viz is Parameters, and Calculated fields.  It was pretty easy to accomplish.

The funnest part of this Viz, was making it look fun.  Putting together the the background image and using a "Roadside Assistance" button for the hover info.  I think this Viz accomplishes the reoccurring theme that I heard at #Data14 and that was to keep it simple.  The artist in me wants the ability to make worksheets, parameters and filters and everything else transparent, maybe in the near future, Tableau will give us that ability.

I hope you find this Viz fun, and useful, especially when traveling with kids :-)

Until next time,

Todd

First blog about being a VizWiz

Let me first start by introducing myself.  I'm Todd and I'm from Ohio.  I'm a Data Analyst, who works with Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server.  I also am a small business owner.  My wife Farrah and I started a photography business about 5 years ago.  Along with being a photographer, I'm some what of a graphic designer, and consider myself an Artist more so than a photographer or a graphic designer.

I'm currently sitting in a hotel room in SeaTac Washington, as I've been at the Tableau Conference #Data14 this week.  I'm sad that it's 8:15 AM on Thursday, and I'm leaving to head back to Ohio and missing a day of the conference, but I'm happy to have had the chance to be here.

Being at #Data14 was an awesome experience, especially during the opening keynote with Christian Chabot, CEO of Tableau, talking about Tableau being a blank canvas, and we are artists.  This was so great to hear as I've been talking like this for the past 3 years that I've been using Tableau.  I've been working hard to bring my Art to my corporate day job, and so far it's been working fairly well.

One of the things that I learned from #Data14 is that I need to be on Twitter, so I created a Twitter account (you can find me @TStoneOhio).   I also learned that I should write a blog, so I created a blog and am now writing my first blog post :-)

Why am I doing all of this?  Well, I'm not going to lie, I want one of my viz's to go virablog, l, lol.  Seriously though, I have read many blogs that have helped me learn, and seen may viz's that have help and inspired me, so I want to return the favor.

With my first blog I want to share my latest viz.  If you didn't know, everyone, well almost everyone in Ohio, loves The Ohio State University, and being born and raised in Ohio, I'm no different.  I know there are many different options for NCAA football schedules, but I wanted to make something that I thought was cool.  Mostly, I put this together because I recently seen a cool Viz on TableauPublic that really made me rethink how I was creating my viz's.  It's actually quite funny, if you've seen me.  I'm a big guy, with tattoo's and some thing I'm tough and unapproachable, but I'm really not that. I think I'm a pretty easy going guy.  But I seen Jewel Loree's "Hello Etsy" viz (http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/gallery/hello-etsy) which is a Hello Kitty theme.  Can you imagine a big, tattooed guy digging a Hello Kitty theme? Well, I did, I love the layout, the color scheme, basically I love the entire idea of this viz.

This one viz changed my way of thinking, and inspired me to use the Artist in me to create something cool, an beautiful.

With my new Ohio State Football viz, I started creating the graphics. Found all the 2014 team helmets, made them into PNG's to be used for shapes.   I used the official Ohio State University font, and tried to keep it simple.  It was a bit of a challenge as the data wasn't the same from every school, so it took some time to get it formatted and shaped, but in the end, I think it was worth it.

What to expect in the future?  Well I hope that I can find time to create some cool viz's on a weekly, maybe bi-weekly basis and share some how I did it, but I'm not making any promises as I do have a day job that keeps me busy, and a wife and  9 yr old son that gets 98% of my free time.

I'll leave you with this, another think I learned from #Data14, Steal like an Artist, this is what Anya A'Hearn said during her Zen Master presentation.  And it's somethign that I've been doing for a couple years.  Seeing other's viz's and downloanding them to reverse engineer them, and taking an idea like "Hello Esty" and being inspired by it.

Todd