Visualize Tableau Conference — Tracking Steps at #Data23

Photo by Luke Chesser on Unsplash

Welcome to the second annual Tableau Conference Step Tracker! One day I’ll come up with a more catchy name for it. But all you need to know is after Tableau Conference, I create a survey where attendees (both in person and virtual) can submit their steps, I do some very light data prep, and make the data available for the community to visualize.

This year, we had 107 participants — over double the responses from last year! Thanks to everyone who submitted their data and shared the survey.

Enough small talk, here’s the data:

TC23 Step Counts - dataset by brosenau

If you’d like to add data from the 2022 conference, you can find that here:

TC22 Step Counts - dataset by brosenau

Go forth and viz! If you share on social media, feel free to tag me in your vizzes.

Bonus Lap: Data Prep Tips, questions to consider, and Inspiration

Data Prep Tips:

1. Consider pivoting the data for the columns — this will give you 1 column for steps instead of 5.

Screenshot showing how to pivot data in Tableau — select the columns you want to pivot, then click the arrow dropdown on one of the columns, and click pivot.

2. After you’ve pivoted the data, change your new “Pivot Field Names” field from “ABC” (string) to a Date field

Screenshot of Tableau Dropdown showing how to change data type.

3. Consider using the twitter handle field to create a URL that links to someone’s twitter profile, or group different step tracking devices together.

Questions to consider

If you’re not sure where to start, here are some places to get started:

• Did in person folks have more steps than virtual?
• If you attended in person, do 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, May 9-Thursday, May 11th. 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 data, how many folks are repeat submitters? How do their 2023 steps compare?

Inspiration

I’d like to close this out with one of my favorite vizzes — Holy Steps Chapman by Michelle Frayman:

While I didn’t make any vizzes from the data myself last year (there’s one hidden on my Tableau Public profile, maybe I’ll finish it someday) I was so happy to see Michelle’s viz get recognized as Viz of the Day.

If you’re looking for feedback on your viz, I highly recommend checking out Viz Feedback Office Hours which occur on Wednesdays. Michelle, Nicole Klassen, and Zak Geis offer viz feedback in a very low key, supportive setting. There are no requirements, your viz can be at any stage of the build, and in any tool! Register for a slot to get the zoom info here: https://t.co/3Rod5gnoQG

Screenshot of the Viz Feedback Office Hours Wednesdays schedule.

That’s all for now, thanks for reading, and I look forward to seeing your vizzes!