Thinking About AI Workflows
Articles
Tableau vs D3.js: Choosing the Right Visualization Tool
A practical comparison of Tableau and D3.js for organizations building dashboards and data visualizations. When to use each, where they overlap, and how they complement each other.
AI Automation vs Manual Workflows: When to Automate and What It Actually Costs
A practical breakdown of AI workflow automation vs manual processes. ROI comparison, time savings, and how to identify which workflows to automate first.
Fractional Consulting vs Building an In-House Analytics Team
Comparing the costs, timelines, and trade-offs of hiring a fractional analytics and AI team versus building capabilities in-house.
From the Archive
Tableau and data practice articles from our earlier years, preserved from the original Boulder Insight blog.
Unlocking the Power of Data for Communities: A Call To Action
How transparent, accessible data visualization builds engaged communities, drawing on Boulder Insight Group's fourth year of work with The Colorado Health Foundation's Pulse Poll dashboard.
Don't let Ventura turn you into a Tab-loo-hoo-zuh-her
Macs running macOS Ventura can fail to recognize the Snowflake ODBC driver in Tableau Desktop. Here are four steps to fix the odbc files manually, without downgrading your operating system.
Friends Don't Let Friends Struggle with Tableau: The One with Easy Naming Conventions
A numbered naming convention for Tableau calculated fields that makes complex nested calculations faster to read, troubleshoot, and hand off, plus the full Boulder Insight naming guide.
Tableau and Chill? Only After a Double-Check with Excel!
Why people still fall back on Excel to verify dashboard numbers, and how building QA sheets in Tableau validates that instinct instead of fighting it.
I Can See Clearly Now
Why dark dashboard backgrounds beat light ones - white is the brightest color and always draws the eye, so a dark background keeps the focus on the data instead of the canvas.
Bridging the Gap with a Guide
Training data is clean, columnar and ready-to-go while real world data is messy. Why Tableau students gain proficiency faster when their training bridges the gap to their own organization's data.
Four Key Ways to Handle Tableaut (ta.BLOAT)
Tableaut is what happens when a Tableau Server holds so many dashboards that users are too overwhelmed to make confident decisions. Four ways to manage the symptoms.
Knowledge-Driven Business Strategy
Being a Data Driven Business is no longer enough. Boulder Insight's crawl, walk, run, soar framework shows how organizations get the right knowledge, at the right time, to make the right decision.
Sugar-Coating Your Data
Why radial pie charts promoted on Tableau Public prioritize style over substance, and why bar charts remain the more effective tool for clear data communication.
5 Ways to Improve Dashboard Engagement
Five practical ways to improve engagement with your Tableau dashboards, covering audience research, simplification, layout, dashboard actions, and color strategy.
15 Awesome Resources for Learning Tableau
Fifteen of our favorite Tableau articles, tutorials and videos from around the internet, covering LOD expressions, parameters, maps, drivers, data governance and sharing your vizzes.
Data Discovery Dashboard in Tableau
A step-by-step tutorial for building a data discovery dashboard in Tableau, using a Measure Discovery and a Dimension Discovery to learn what questions to ask of a new data set.
Displaying A Dashboard On A TV Screen
What it takes to put a dashboard on a big screen TV, from browser and refresh-frequency requirements to BI tool choice, dashboard design, and step-by-step Chromecast setup.
Tableau Server Administration - Made Easy!
Why Tableau Server administration gets harder as your server matures, and how the Boulder Insight Admin service simplifies permissions auditing and server health monitoring.
VizBot: Automated Reporting for Tableau
VIZbot leverages your existing Tableau Server to download updated reports on a schedule and burst them to targeted users as PDF, PNG, or CSV.
Tableau Data Connectors and APIs
Why Tableau's Web Data Connector breaks down when an API doesn't support CORS, and how Boulder Insight's Smart Proxy System handles the CORS, debugging, cost-per-query, and monitoring problems it leaves behind.
Regular Expressions In Tableau
An introduction to regular expressions and Tableau's REGEXP functions, with worked examples that parse zip codes, states, and street names out of a messy address field.
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