Massively Useful

Twice as many Americans as Germans want self-driving cars. That’s one of the first things I learned from asking the next set of questions. About 400,000 people have put down $1000 each to reserve Tesla’s upcoming Model 3 – the all-electric, potentially self-driving automobile. Some of them even stood in lines that stretched for blocks to put down $1000…

Of course, you can SEE the version and build number of Tableau Desktop from the Help menu, with Help > About. But usually you want to give this information to someone else – for example, pasting it into an email or support case form. You could use your eyeballs and fingers, and transcribe the sixteen digits the…

Tableau releases maintenance updates on a regular basis – about monthly. Since Tableau connects to dozens of kinds of datasources, which are themselves constantly updated, it’s always a good idea to stay on the latest maintenance release for your Tableau version. (E.g. if your company is running Tableau Server 8.2, you should upgrade to the…

Color is tremendously powerful in creating data visualizations. Tableau allows you to create custom color palettes. And usually people do this by: Find an image with the colors you want to use Use an eyedropper color picker tool; select each color in the image. Get the color code. Open your preferences.tps file and write a line of…

I like to listen to music while I’m working. In fact, I like to listen to music all the time. Especially good music. Here’s some: For anyone interested, I put together a 6+ hours Spotify (yeah yeah) playlist of my favorite tracks from 2014 (and still working on it). posted by Lutoslawski at 1:06 PM…

Do you have multiple versions of Tableau Desktop installed on your Mac? You might be beta testing the new version, but still need to work with a current version for production work. Wish you could just right-click on a .twbx and choose on the fly which version to open it in? Well, thanks to Mac OS X, it’s easy. No registry…