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

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