Exercises: Tableau Part Four

This chapter is focused on working with dates and creating beautiful and effective visualizations and stories in Tableau. We want you to create a bullet journal in Tableau to practice implementing these functions.

A bullet journal is a system designed by Ryder Carroll that has grown in popularity over the past decade with over 10 million posts on Instagram under #bulletjournal and countless Youtubers sharing their latest bullet journal spreads. Many attribute the popularity of the system to its flexibility.

Ultimately, as the journalers, we can track whatever we want in our journals.

We can create spreads to track our progress on financial goals, reading goals, or any other goals that matter to us. We can also be as artistic as we want to be with our bullet journals.

While you will find many posts about the virtues of bullet journals as a creative endeavour, every bullet journal contains a lot of data and a lot of it is time-based, which is why we are asking you to create one in Tableau.

Getting Started

Before you open up Tableau, take some time to brainstorm.

You need to create at least three visualizations, representing three spreads in your Tableau bullet journal.

If you are already a bullet journal advocate, do you want to recreate three spreads you have already made? Are you struggling to think of what data you could track with Tableau?

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

  1. water intake
  2. exercise data, such as steps and workout trackers
  3. hours of sleep
  4. screentime
  5. mood tracker
  6. mealtimes/macros intake
  7. goodreads
  8. medicine tracker

You can find even more ideas on Pinterest and Instagram.

Once you have your three spreads planned, you need the data behind the spreads. If you do not want to share your own data, try to make a bullet journal for a fictional character. Your data can be in whatever form you find helpful, whether it starts with a spreadsheet or a pandas DataFrame.

If you pull any data from Kaggle to add to your bullet journal, make sure to share the source.

Putting together Your Visualizations

As you assemble your three visualizations, recall the best practices we shared in the reading. How can you employ these best practices to make your bullet journal stand out?

Once you have three visualizations, you need to assemble your work in EITHER a dashboard or a story. Recall that dashboards can help users compare related visualizations while stories can combine visualizations that may seem unrelated to effectively relay our work.

Here is a former student’s submission to use as a general reference .

Submitting Your Work

Once your work is complete, publish your story and submit the link on Canvas for the exercise.