Why am I not a Tableau Ambassador in 2023?

A warning to start, this is going to be difficult for me to write and it’s probably going to be difficult to read (for you, the reader) but I think it has to be done.  I won’t mention names, but you might know who I’m referring to at times.  I would also welcome ANY comments […]

Creating a Personal Access Token (PAT) in Tableau Cloud

With Tableau enforcing the MFA logins for Tableau Cloud, it’s important to switch to another method of authentication when you have scripts that interact with your Tableau Cloud instance. The recommended method is creating a Personal Access Token (PAT), here’s how to do it:   Step 1 Edit your account settings Login to Tableau Cloud […]

Python to Tableau Hyper publishing

Using Python, you can automate the publishing of new (or updated) data to Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud.  A lot of my clients use Tableau Cloud, and recently Tableau has started enforcing the MFA security policies and along with that you can no longer use username/password combinations to login and publish the new data. Now […]

Taking a great Tableau screenshot

I see a lot of people on the Tableau Community Forums, Reddit, Discord, Stack Overflow (and probably a few others that I frequent) posting screenshots that don’t really provide enough information, so I thought I’d post about it to help everyone. TL;DR – make sure you include the entire screen, but redact parts where necessary […]

Monitoring Snowflake use and costs in Tableau

A quick intro Snowflake has been around for a number of years now, it’s an awesome cloud-hosted database that works very easily with Tableau.  I have several clients that use the Snowflake-Tableau combination (usually with software like Alteryx or Hevo to load the data in to Snowflake) and then perform transformations on the data (Alteryx […]

A tale of two Certifications

A little bit of background info This probably doesn’t sound very good, but this story started almost a year ago when I decided to sit the Tableau Certified Data Analyst certification.  The certification was the same structure as today – a knowledge-based component (simple Q&A) and a performance-based component (hands-on lab).  I fired through the knowledge […]

Pivotting data for easier use in Tableau

I just answered this question on the Tableau Community Forums : https://community.tableau.com/message/1082243 It’s the typical problem of having the data created as a cross-tab (ie reporting style rather than database style), but with the added complexity of having 2 dimensions combined together (Country & Year in this case): I decided to NOT use Alteryx for […]

How do I run commands from Excel ?

My first blog post – I started my business just over a year ago and always promised myself to blog about what I do. A year later I look at the website and it feels pretty empty, so hopefully from now on I can post more about what I do 😉👍 You may or may […]