Visualize Tableau Conference: Results of the Tableau Conference 2025 Step Tracker
The data is in — time to viz!
This year’s Tableau Conference was held in San Diego from April 13–18. Post conference, both in-person and virtual attendees submitted their steps to my 4th annual step tracker.
Now the results are ready for you to create your own visualizations!
This year we had a record 293 submissions — running far past this year’s goal of 200. Thank you to everyone who submitted data, and a special thanks to all who supported the project by sharing it with others.
Enough small talk, here’s the data:
Update June 2025: Thanks to Dennis Kao, there is an additional data file this year- Latitude and Longitude for Hotels! This is a great addition for anyone interested in adding maps to their visualizations.
Want even more data? Here are direct links to the data from prior years:
I’ve also created a project on data.world with all the datasets — if you’d like to save one link, this is the one to bookmark:
https://data.world/brosenau/tableau-conference-step-trackers
Note: you will need a free account with data.world to view/download data
I’m excited to see what everyone creates — feel free to tag me on social media so I can see your vizzes! I am not on x/twitter anymore, but I am on Bluesky and hang out in the Tableau Community Slack. I highly recommend joining the slack space, it’s a great place to connect with the DataFam. If you’re looking for feedback, check out the #community-viz-feedback channel, and don’t forget to show off your finished work in #community-share!
Bonus Lap: data prep, questions to consider, inspiration, and feedback opportunities
What data prep was done?
Every person that submitted a response was assigned a User ID. I ensured each person had 1 row of data. Anyone who wished their data remain anonymous, their names + social profiles were removed from the dataset before publishing. I normalized a few country names based on Google Sheet’s cleanup suggestions, and removed a few spammy entries. The resulting dataset is 285 rows.
What data prep should I consider?
- Consider pivoting the data for the step data columns — this will give you one column for steps, and one column for dates.
2. Try using the social media handle fields to create a URLs that link to someone’s profile, or see if you can creatively make groupings of people based on company, hotel, or shoe type
3. Be careful looking through the data — did everyone interpret the “when did you travel to and from conference” question the same way? (spoiler alert, they did not). Are there outliers in the distance fields that should be checked? While I did mildly clean the data — it’s not perfect!
What should I viz?
If you’re unsure where to start, think about these prompts:
- Did in-person folks have more steps than virtual?
- If you submitted data, where you see yourself in the data? How do you compare to the average, mean, or median steps?
- Does the hotel folks stayed at seem to have any impact on steps?
- The official conference days were Tuesday, April 15 through Thursday, April 17th. How do these days compare to other days recorded? Why might they be lower or higher than other days?
- If you’re using the 2022–2024 data, how many folks are repeat submitters? How do their 2025 steps compare? Did San Diego have higher step counts than Las Vegas conferences?
Further Inspiration
I’ll close out with a few vizzes from prior years:
Data24 Step Count by Michelle Frayman:
#Data23 Step Tracker by Christian Felix:
That’s all for this year, go forth and viz!
PS: A heartfelt thank you to everyone who supported the project at every phase this year — from survey construction to logo design, and especially sharing the project with others. A special shoutout to the Women in Dataviz community for their continued support, and thanks to the Tableau Public team for featuring the step tracker as Viz of the Day during conference. It made a difference! I’m already looking to incorporate everyone’s feedback for next year (and yes, I’ll bring stickers again!)
