Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you’re having a great start to 2025 and are poised to have a happy, healthy, and successful year. I’m excited to start off the podcast this year with my friend Kevin Wee, a Tableau creator and visualizer, who shares his journey into data visualization. Kevin’s Tableau journey starts in 2019 at Purdue University where he faced challenges working with data, but grew in his ability to create interesting and engaging dashboards through creative projects and community involvement. Kevin and I talk about his approach to Tableau, how he incorporates other tools like Figma, PowerPoint, and Excel, and how he is using AI tools to help create better and better data tools. I hope you’ll enjoy this week’s episode of the show!

Resources

Follow Kevin’s Tableau Public page and check out his website.

Guest Bio

Kevin Wee is a Tableau Visionary, Ambassador, and Featured Author who publishes dashboards and infographics with innovative designs and functions on his Tableau Public profile. His creations have been featured as the Viz of the Day and in the Tableau Conference Viz Gallery. He is known for his “Tableau x Figma series,” which shows how to create dashboards with good UI using both tools. He has presented the series in many Tableau User Group meetups. Kevin won the 2023 “Biggest Growth” Vizzies Award for his creative works and contribution to the DataFam community. Kevin has a PhD in scientific visualization evaluation. He is a Lead BI Analyst at Discover Financial Services, where he develops data tools for business analytics and provides Tableau training to employees.

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Transcript

00:02.82
Jon
Hey Kevin, happy holidays, happy new year. How are you? Good to see you again. It’s been a few months. Well, more than a few.

00:10.16
Kevin Wee
It’s been a few, yeah.

00:11.61
Jon
It’s been a bit.

00:11.93
Kevin Wee
it’s been ah It’s been more than a few months. I think the last time you and I met was in the Outlier conference.

00:13.78
Jon
Yeah.

00:19.37
Jon
Yeah. Well, that was probably first. and i Then we saw each other at Tableau in last spring.

00:23.49
Kevin Wee
And then before that it was GRC and then the Tableau conference last year.

00:28.33
Jon
That’s right, that’s right, GRC, I forgot about that. Yeah, that’s right. All right, well, great to see you again. I hope all’s well. um So ah we’re gonna talk about Tableau today for folks who are so always wanna hear about your cool work.

00:41.99
Jon
I thought we would start with ah your Tableau journey because everybody has like this unique, interesting story about how they got into Tableau and why they got all excited about it. So I wanna hear about that and then we can talk about some of the stuff that you’ve been working on.

00:55.21
Kevin Wee
Yeah, sure. um Regarding my Tableau journey, I started ah learning about Tableau in 2019.

00:56.18
Jon
Great.

01:03.16
Kevin Wee
I was a graduate student at Purdue University in the Department of Chemistry. However, my research was on scientific visualization. Effectively, I was evaluating a specific biomedical animation produced by Harvard Medical School, University of Toronto, and UC Davis.

01:23.89
Kevin Wee
They co-produced an animation, um and I was the evaluator of the animation. um By the end of ah the data gathering process, I got a lot of data about how the animation was made, how students perceived animations, how teachers wanted students to learn from the animation, got all this data, had no idea how to analyze it at all.

01:44.08
Jon
Hmm. Yeah.

01:46.95
Kevin Wee
like at all So I was exploring different analytics tools, quantitative and qualitative options. Eventually I bumped into Tableau. um um It was recommended by one of the data visualization professor that that I met in an academic conference. And then I took her class in 2019. And then after that, just started to use it to build some charts for my own project, and then the pandemic hit.

02:17.86
Kevin Wee
um in 2020. And then there was also the time where I realized that I really need to find um my next career. I knew that very early on that I didn’t want to work in academia. um So in the pandemic, when everybody, when Table Conference was online,

02:38.71
Kevin Wee
that that year, ah that’s where I came across the term Tableau Public, Makeover Monday. ah Everybody recommended me in order to find a data job out of academia, it would be best if you could have a portfolio. So I started doing Makeover Monday um and then gradually realizing that I was actually quite good at that thing. And then um by the beginning of 2021, I was reached out by someone in the Data Visualization Society, ah specifically in a Chicago location tab, because I’ve been sharing my personal portfolio work in the Slack channel. So he reached out to me and said that, oh, by the way, I was also from Purdue Chemistry. And you were also from Purdue Chemistry, but you’re not doing chemistry stuff on the internet. What’s up?

03:33.74
Kevin Wee
And then we talked long story short after a long two and three hours chat. He said that, by the way, I’m currently working the credit card company and we may have an opening position if you would like to test the water with us.

03:47.19
Jon
Huh.

03:47.43
Kevin Wee
That’s how I got my job and I just passed my third year anniversary recently. So um so that’s my career path. So I switched out of academia. But at the same time, I still do a lot of things with the Tableau user community, or ah some people that are familiar with the term, it would be called the DataFam.

03:58.27
Jon
Mhm.

04:06.73
Kevin Wee
So I was pretty engaged with the DataFam. I started giving talks in different Tableau user groups, or a Tux for short. and um suddenly everybody want, ah not everybody, that’s very, you know, not humble of me. Suddenly I received a lot of opportunity to give ah Tuck talks in different occasions. And that’s, um I think in 2022, I was ah chosen as a Tableau Ambassador. And then starting this year, I was chosen as a visionary based on all these works that I’ve been doing. So yeah, that’s a very long answer too.

04:47.37
Jon
No, that’s great.

04:48.08
Kevin Wee
is they by my

04:48.25
Jon
Well, congrats, congrats on all that.

04:49.10
Kevin Wee
yeah

04:49.94
Jon
I wanted to ask about the portfolio building, because this is a question that comes up a lot for people who are starting out or maybe they’re shifting gears in their career.

05:01.69
Jon
And, you know, one of the questions I hear the same kind of thing is like, you know, how do I kind of get started in in the field? And so how did you think about building your DataViz portfolio?

05:13.26
Kevin Wee
What is the name by my name?

05:13.59
Jon
was it yeah were you Were you sticking with a single tool? Were you just like working in the Makeover Monday and just trying things?

05:23.81
Jon
like where And where were you posting things? like so So for folks who are kind of in a similar boat as you were, what would your recommendations be to help them build out like their DataViz portfolio?

05:35.28
Kevin Wee
I think, um first of all, I think a lot of people when they started out, ah they were overwhelmed by all the options and platforms out there.

05:43.82
Jon
Yeah.

05:44.69
Kevin Wee
It’s understandable because especially nowadays, different tools, a lot of tools are very easy to use and a lot of tools are free. So how do you choose? I think my answer is it doesn’t matter. Stick with one and be good at one to begin with and then you branch out.

06:02.48
Kevin Wee
um Of course, to me, a lot of people didn’t know that even though now I was known for a Tableau, before 2019 at Purdue, I was known by the person that can do everything on PowerPoint.

06:16.73
Jon
Hmm.

06:17.28
Kevin Wee
So I was on PowerPoint a lot. I was on Excel a lot. It’s just that I realized that PowerPoint and Excel is hard to manipulate a large body of dataset, especially non-numerical datasets.

06:27.91
Jon
Yeah.

06:30.81
Kevin Wee
um That’s why I branch out to different options. and um And that’s why I’ve learned other softwares. um I was actually actually also exploring rawgraph.io for a couple of years, ah well, for a couple of months.

06:46.17
Kevin Wee
ah But then I realized that it’s easy to start with something, but it’s hard to customize um the chart compared to using Tableau. But okay, go back.

06:55.10
Jon
Yeah.

06:56.33
Kevin Wee
um I started using Tableau because number one, it’s free for students. So that’s easy. That’s free for students.

07:02.83
Jon
Yeah.

07:03.32
Kevin Wee
And that’s also what I’ve heard. Very famous on the street. um but By that, I mean ah in the industry. So um Purdue gave annual all free license to students, so I leveraged it.

07:16.67
Kevin Wee
and Also, I also learned that Tableau Public, it’s a you know freely used platform website for you to put your work up there and then share your take on different data sets. So um that’s how I get started. And also, a lot of people also ask, like there’s so many different you know challenges for data out there.

07:38.91
Kevin Wee
And my recommendation is always, um if you just started, just pick one.

07:38.89
Jon
e

07:44.55
Kevin Wee
And I would say maybe one of this, too. Makeover Monday or back to this basics, because these two are just enough for you to warm up. And once you get into the cadence of creating good quality charts with these two challenges, you can branch out.

08:02.27
Kevin Wee
You will know when you’re ready to branch out.

08:04.20
Jon
Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.

08:05.55
Kevin Wee
Don’t try to do everything to begin with. Stick with one thing and do it until you can repeat it without too much of an effort and then you branch out.

08:15.01
Jon
Yeah.

08:15.56
Kevin Wee
Hope that answered your question.

08:16.01
Jon
And, and, it and in Tableau, I think unlike many other tools, I mean, I think one of the, one of the, you already mentioned the data fan, but I think that’s one of the reasons why people, you know, really enjoy working with the tools that there is this community and you have this opportunity to sort of build your profile on Tableau’s public and so on the page.

08:35.74
Jon
And so you can sort of build out your your portfolio. Is that where you, Pointed people or did you set up your own separate website to point people to again? I’m thinking about someone who you know wants to break in they want to do dataviz say you know they’re they’re applying for jobs they want to do dataviz like should they point people to Their tableau public profile and say I you know I’m really good at tableau. This is what I do here’s my profile or Do you think it makes more sense to have sort of a separate place where people can go?

09:07.35
Kevin Wee
So let me tell you what I did. And let me tell you what I did. And then we may talk about my recommendation.

09:13.28
Jon
Yeah.

09:13.47
Kevin Wee
I i started getting my own KevinWe.com in 2018, but I didn’t actually use it much.

09:20.33
Jon
evening

09:21.98
Kevin Wee
I was just more like, I don’t want anyone else to have it. So let’s just buy it

09:24.71
Jon
That’s what I have it. Yeah. Yeah.

09:26.33
Kevin Wee
And then after that, i if you go to my KevinWe.com and scroll to the bottom, you will find that at the first couple of blocks that I’ve made were my own makeover for some charts that i with the data that I gathered using PowerPoint.

09:44.89
Kevin Wee
And then I not just show before and after, I also explain um why I made a certain design choices. um It’s um is’ a good starter, but I am a very slow writer. I realized that ah very, very soon that i if you ask me to write something, you’re gonna wait for at least a month.

10:03.54
Kevin Wee
so um So I noticed that about me. and Meanwhile, make over Monday, it kind of forced you into a weekly cadence, right?

10:09.97
Jon
yeah

10:10.12
Kevin Wee
And then you have to keep on producing the charts and then only justify it when someone asks of it. So so that became some something that I am comfy with.

10:20.82
Kevin Wee
um

10:21.39
Jon
Right.

10:22.03
Kevin Wee
um So if you are, if you’re a non-writer, like me, if you like to show more than you like to tell, then maybe Tableau Public would be something that you could direct people to. But let’s say if you’re someone like, you know, and you can write a lot about your justifications, you can, you know, cite ah um different articles, then ah maybe a blog would be something that it’s more suitable to you.

10:48.20
Kevin Wee
Or you like to sketch, you like to show the sketch and then the viz, then the blog would be perfect for you.

10:53.37
Jon
Wow. Yeah, yeah, that that that’s smart. Yeah, sort of the ah talking more about the the process or in addition to the final thing, talking about the process. Yeah, that’s that’s really interesting. um So ah one of the places where I In my own tablet work found your work super helpful was in these. um I don’t know what you call them but sort of foreground or background images that you can put on your dashboard, you know, the sort of like a skin. um And I was hoping you could talk a little bit about

11:24.55
Jon
how you think of developing those and then how you actually build them. I know you use, I think you use Figma a lot. um you know i The last one I did that needed I needed your help on, I was doing in PowerPoint, but maybe you could talk a little bit about how you how you think about these images in Tableau and then how you go about building them out.

11:43.67
Kevin Wee
Yeah. Well, first of all, um it’s I think it’s a gap that we see in the existing Tableau ecosystem that it doesn’t have too many graphic manipulation interface.

11:58.64
Jon
Yeah.

11:58.95
Kevin Wee
As a result, even in 2020, I already started seeing people using PowerPoint to create images and then lay it as a background or a semi-transparent foreground.

12:13.48
Kevin Wee
of ah dashboard um With that in mind, and also if you go to Tableau Public, you will see a lot of times people’s visualizations, they’re clearly not out of the box functionality of Tableau.

12:25.29
Jon
Yeah.

12:26.44
Kevin Wee
Be it title, font, or like sometimes you see some very dramatic shading or gradients on the infographic. You know that these are not built just using Tableau.

12:40.14
Kevin Wee
So, and gradually I’ve heard that the term Figma pop up and then And then I’ve heard that it is one of the commonly used software for people trying to implement graphic design in tableau charts.

12:56.08
Kevin Wee
um I think I learned it in early 2021. So it’s still rather rather short period of time.

13:02.63
Jon
Mm hmm. Yeah.

13:07.33
Kevin Wee
And um and I just try to play with it. At first, I just try to use it to create, you know, rounded rectangles to place my charts, just make it look a little bit more modern.

13:18.71
Jon
Mm hmm.

13:19.61
Kevin Wee
And by modern, I mean, you know, modern four years ago. I don’t feel like that they’re modern anymore.

13:22.97
Jon
You’re right, yeah.

13:25.20
Kevin Wee
But yeah, it’s just to to do something to stand out a little bit without distracting too much.

13:26.41
Jon
Mm hmm.

13:31.94
Kevin Wee
But then later when I joined Discover, and the the company that I’m currently working with, I got several big projects where big projects where I got to build charts, ah not charts, dashboards from scratch.

13:47.01
Kevin Wee
So I did tell my manager that um

13:47.29
Jon
Hmm.

13:52.38
Kevin Wee
ken You let me try to use Figma like just for one project.

13:54.37
Jon
Hmm.

13:57.50
Kevin Wee
Let’s just try to do it and I’m going to use it on the background and maybe lay a semi-transparent annotation layer in front of the foreground and the users can click show and hide of that annotation layer at will.

14:10.24
Kevin Wee
Let’s just sandwich this and see how it goes. Business partner love it. I think it up to the SVPs. Everybody was blown away by that. and then And then I realized that if I set up this background image and semi-transparent layer well, I can quickly create different iterations of them.

14:29.36
Kevin Wee
Therefore, I started to be able to mass produce a lot of different dashboard layouts in a very short period of time. And they’re all visually consistent with good organizations and layouts, and everything’s perfectly aligned.

14:44.06
Jon
Great.

14:45.18
Kevin Wee
Everything’s perfectly aligned. It looks like it’s coming out of a united team instead of everybody’s doing their own stuff.

14:50.29
Jon
Yeah, right.

14:52.03
Kevin Wee
So after doing that, I remember in within my first five projects, I was able to create at least 20-ish charts, not charts, 20-ish dashboard pages, all with very consistent view.

15:05.60
Kevin Wee
And then everybody’s were blown away by that. My boss told me that, I thought you you’re going to take three months for this. You finish everything in a week. I was like, I didn’t know that I was supposed to do this.

15:14.74
Jon
Yeah, I had all this time, yeah.

15:15.54
Kevin Wee
is um

15:16.89
Jon
So so did you, but but to set that up,

15:20.30
Kevin Wee
Mm hmm.

15:20.33
Jon
You need to know your dashboard size and layout before you go and build the skin, right? So like how does your, how do you think about your, or what is your creative process when you’re doing that?

15:28.08
Kevin Wee
Yeah.

15:33.63
Jon
Are you like, I’m just going to build what I think is the best dashboard.

15:35.16
Kevin Wee
Mm

15:38.31
Jon
And I’m not going to worry about the aesthetic.

15:38.36
Kevin Wee
hmm.

15:40.07
Jon
I’m not going to overly worry myself about the aesthetics until like the very end, when I can go build in these backgrounds or, or foregrounds.

15:47.56
Kevin Wee
Yeah, so and ah two part of the question. First of all, let let me answer the dimension first.

15:50.56
Jon
Yeah.

15:52.80
Kevin Wee
So I test the dimensions of it.

15:52.83
Jon
Yeah.

15:54.80
Kevin Wee
First of all, we’re using the fixed dimension.

15:56.17
Jon
Mm hmm.

15:57.37
Kevin Wee
So we’re not doing flexible. um The thing about flexible dimension is that everybody has a different laptop and everybody’s at home. They have different screens. If you let them go, whatever they want, nothing’s going to align.

16:09.37
Kevin Wee
It’s going to be a disaster. What I noticed is as long as the width and the height is in the golden ratio, it would fit most of the screen in a good degree.

16:22.31
Jon
Hmm.

16:23.03
Kevin Wee
So that’s good enough. And also, um after several trial, I believe we set the width to be 13.8 pixel. The reason why it’s 13.8, not 1300, it’s because 13.8 is divisible by 12.

16:34.84
Jon
Yeah.

16:39.97
Jon
Hmm.

16:41.65
Kevin Wee
So in the middle, you can put one, two, three, four, six charts, and everything will still align distribute evenly without um the need of decimals.

16:44.35
Jon
Oh.

16:47.71
Jon
That right.

16:52.55
Jon
Ooh.

16:53.40
Kevin Wee
Yeah.

16:54.04
Jon
Right.

16:54.63
Kevin Wee
And also it’s making it very easy to see whether someone stole our design because there’s no way you come out with 1808.

16:58.42
Jon
ha and Yeah.

17:01.22
Kevin Wee
Yeah. No, 1308. I’m sorry, 1308.

17:05.14
Jon
Yeah.

17:06.00
Kevin Wee
So that’s the dimension problem. Second, aesthetic part. I think a lot of people thought the reason why we use Figma or any graphical software to create a background and foreground was because of the aesthetic.

17:17.05
Jon
Ooh.

17:19.95
Kevin Wee
Don’t get me wrong. I do think they look good.

17:22.77
Jon
Yeah.

17:22.97
Kevin Wee
But to me, they are first to have a large team have a consistent visual language.

17:27.63
Jon
Yeah.

17:30.50
Kevin Wee
And now I already set the template for you. Now all you have to do is just reorganize the cards for the charts. You don’t have to worry about what’s the color for the font.

17:40.24
Jon
yeah

17:42.35
Kevin Wee
You don’t have to worry about the color for the site navigation bar. You just need to care about the chart parts. It kind of reduced the workload for our day-to-day analyst.

17:53.81
Kevin Wee
So that is to me more powerful than aesthetic. Aesthetic is just that I don’t want to create anything ugly, but that’s not the sole reason.

18:01.92
Jon
yeah Yeah, no, that that that makes total sense.

18:02.90
Kevin Wee
yeah

18:04.67
Jon
i mean i’m ah I know lots of people have like mixed feelings about templates, but i think um I think a lot of people who have mixed feelings about templates haven’t worked in large organizations where people need to get stuff done to get out the door.

18:17.18
Jon
And yeah like you said, you you lower the barrier for folks to focus on the data work and worry less about the branding and the and the consistency.

18:28.25
Jon
um So, so I reached out to you to do this show. We’ve talked about this. I’ve talked about having you on the show in the past and never sort of got around to asking, but then a couple of months ago you published a big dashboard called talk data podcasts to me, um which I kind of think went like as viral as things can go in our data is community. So, you know, that that’s pretty cool. um And so I thought maybe you could kind of walk us through that, that project.

18:56.77
Kevin Wee
Yeah, it’s, um well, first of all, it was ah my personal like passion project. No one’s you know commission me commissioning me to do it.

19:03.85
Jon
Yeah.

19:05.28
Kevin Wee
um I listen to a lot of data podcasts while I’m working out, cooking, driving. It’s just a perfect time killer for me. um But then I realized a lot of people, especially people that just, ah not just people that just started practicing in data,

19:23.24
Kevin Wee
feel A lot of people were, even those that were in COE of a company, um they didn’t realize that, oh, there’s something they call data podcasts.

19:32.25
Jon
e

19:33.46
Kevin Wee
And because to them, data visualizations or statistics is something that you have to do it on the screen, right? So without a screen, what is it to talk about?

19:39.31
Jon
Yeah. Right.

19:42.41
Kevin Wee
so um So I always wanted to compile a list, maybe on my blog, to show people these are the podcasts that I listened to. These are the graphic design YouTube channels that I followed. That may be another story.

19:56.74
Kevin Wee
but I want to show people this list and then try to help people to get into the community or or the network more. But then it would be very boring if I just give you an Excel spreadsheet with you know hyperlinks. So meanwhile, i was trying to I’ve been hearing people talking about, oh, you can use chat GPT to do coding a lot. So I thought, let’s just try using it. So there’s one weekend I talked to my chat GPT. And um I was say oh like, oh, let

20:30.61
Kevin Wee
write me a web scraping Python codes ah to get every episode for Data Plus Love, ah the podcast channel. And then after that, I was like, okay, I like the data set. Now try to rewrite it to export it in CSV. Now rewrite it to get API credentials from my Spotify channel. um Now rewrite it ah for 10 different podcast channels.

20:57.81
Kevin Wee
And then step by steps, I got a huge data set.

21:01.20
Jon
yeah

21:02.30
Kevin Wee
And after that, I just explored it. um and then put it to Tableau. And then, of course, use my Figma magic to come up with a layout, the design, the color palette, and then ah put together the dashboard that you saw.

21:18.68
Kevin Wee
ah Talk Data podcast, to me, is actually you know coming from the euphemisms talk data to me. And and that’s before that was talk dirty to me. Yeah, talk data to me.

21:26.65
Jon
Yeah.

21:27.67
Kevin Wee
And I was like, OK, how about Talk Data podcast? to me. And yeah, and um because this is a personal project, it’s not a business project, I try to make it a little bit fun, right? ah First of all, dark mode, not line mode.

21:40.23
Kevin Wee
And also, if this is a business dashboard, everything will be rectangle, right? It will be rectangle bars and everything.

21:44.77
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.

21:47.00
Kevin Wee
But I want to make it fun because it’s for myself. So I make it you know look a little bit like the synthesizer. Do you know the synthesizers for DJing?

21:55.79
Jon
Yeah.

21:56.51
Kevin Wee
Yeah. Trying to make it look like that. And then also leveraging the multi-hue sequential color palette, Verdist. And Verdist happens to have purple and green, which is the which are the color for Spotify and Apple Podcast.

22:10.78
Kevin Wee
So it’s like, OK, everything’s aligned.

22:10.97
Jon
Yeah, right. Yeah, perfect.

22:12.62
Kevin Wee
Let’s do it.

22:13.01
Jon
Yeah.

22:14.05
Kevin Wee
Yeah. So yeah, that’s the final outcome that you see.

22:14.86
Jon
Yeah.

22:17.34
Jon
So did you, did you discover anything about your personal podcast listening habits by, by actually looking at the data?

22:26.56
Kevin Wee
So no, I did not look into which podcast I’ve played for several reasons.

22:31.01
Jon
Yeah.

22:32.28
Kevin Wee
Number one is I noticed because sometimes I do it on Spotify. Sometimes I do it on Apple podcasts. So it’s not going to be complete. And second, I don’t, I don’t know how to solve this yet, but sometimes when you play it, it would replay.

22:47.26
Kevin Wee
And if you did not replay it through, it would say that you didn’t play it through.

22:47.27
Jon
Oh.

22:51.02
Jon
Oh, interesting.

22:51.64
Kevin Wee
I was like, I already listened to this thing more than once.

22:53.55
Jon
Right.

22:54.22
Kevin Wee
So I haven’t solved that yet. So no, I didn’t. So for that project, I didn’t include any of my personal listening history in it.

23:02.91
Jon
he

23:03.10
Kevin Wee
But I do know that like the, the, the, the, the, the, some of the famous one, I did a plus love, uh, policy of this podcast. I have to be frank. I didn’t listen to all of them. I only pick the one that more on the graphical side.

23:16.36
Jon
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

23:16.94
Kevin Wee
Or well, not just more on the graphical side, you also have a couple of episodes with, you know, Jen Christensen, or you also talk about qualitative data.

23:23.35
Jon
Yeah.

23:25.49
Kevin Wee
Those are the one that the specific topics that I like. So I rhyme with them.

23:28.48
Jon
Yeah.

23:30.17
Kevin Wee
Yeah. And yeah, so this, that’s the final outcome that you see.

23:34.31
Jon
So what was the, so I saw it like everywhere. I saw it on all my channels and so what, what was the feedback? Like what were you hearing from people when they, when they saw it and they started playing around with it?

23:46.75
Kevin Wee
i I’m trying to think. I think number one is a lot of people appreciate that I am like they never heard of a lot of these channels before.

23:57.13
Kevin Wee
So it’s more like in terms of knowledge, they appreciated that now we have it.

23:57.29
Jon
Hmm. Right.

24:02.37
Kevin Wee
And I think other than that, also those that are very, you know, uh good in data visualization they would appreciate the UI interface like how slick everything was especially when you click the bars around the dots would just move very smoothly they’re more you know technically impressed um uh but also i also have a couple people realizing that oh a lot of the channels stop

24:13.06
Jon
Yeah. Mm hmm.

24:25.91
Kevin Wee
ah they they they has been discontinued so they’re like oh i have a lot of episodes but now you’re showing me only have like a couple couple was that because i only picked the last five years because that’s you know when hell breaks loose in the whole world that’s when i started to listen to podcasts so um so yeah it’s i got a mix uh back of um reviews but

24:28.29
Jon
Right. Right. Yeah.

24:45.91
Kevin Wee
And also also, a lot of people were impressed by the color palette.

24:46.54
Jon
Huh.

24:48.71
Kevin Wee
Apparently, there’s still a lot of people didn’t realize multi-hue sequential color that are color-blind friendly.

24:53.26
Jon
Yeah. Huh.

24:56.52
Kevin Wee
It’s a thing. So maybe maybe you could invite people to talk about this, because I think i think we need to have more conversations on other than the infernum, magma, um plasma, and veritas.

24:57.68
Jon
Yeah.

25:00.68
Jon
For sure.

25:09.38
Kevin Wee
What else that we can offer to the world?

25:09.46
Jon
yeah

25:12.12
Jon
Yeah, yeah, for sure.

25:13.85
Kevin Wee
me

25:13.93
Jon
Um, okay. So I want to ask you a couple of specific things about, about Tableau. So I want to start with, uh, we’re, we’re in the new year here. Um, what, uh, let’s start with, what do you like best and what do you hate?

25:27.25
Jon
What do you like the most and what do you hate the most about, about Tableau?

25:31.02
Kevin Wee
I see, I see. Let’s start with what I like most about Tableau. I think what I like most about Tableau is that it has a very mature and well-built network of users that are willing to help each other.

25:42.46
Jon
Mm hmm.

25:46.20
Kevin Wee
I’ve i tried to check this with, you never heard this about Excel.

25:50.58
Jon
No, right. That’s right.

25:51.75
Kevin Wee
You never heard this about R or Power BI is trying to do something similar, which I appreciate because I think in order for the Tableau users to get stronger, you need to have someone that’s something else that’s equally stronger to to to feed each other as the energy.

25:57.85
Jon
Yeah.

26:05.50
Jon
Mm hmm.

26:06.38
Kevin Wee
right

26:07.05
Jon
Yeah.

26:07.46
Kevin Wee
So that is something that I just find it amazing. I am part of this, you know, community, of course. and And I think just the fact that every time you throw a questions out there, someone would immediately jump into helping you without belittling you um most of the time.

26:25.18
Kevin Wee
it’s a it’s It’s a good thing. That’s also why I always feel very welcome when I step out of academia.

26:27.76
Jon
Yeah.

26:31.42
Kevin Wee
People not just tell me that, oh, this guy’s been living in Ivory Tower for for his whole life. What does he want to do with us?

26:36.31
Jon
Yeah.

26:38.83
Kevin Wee
I’ve never received those vibes in the Tableau user community.

26:42.24
Jon
Right.

26:44.90
Kevin Wee
So that’s something that I like the most. um What I think may be something that’s like can be improved the most. Maybe I think currently there are a lot of discussions on, well, first of all, I think there has a lot of opportunities to improve between different Tableau softwares, like Tableau desktop, Tableau public, Tableau server, Tableau cloud.

27:10.68
Kevin Wee
If you use any two of these four combos, you will realize that a lot of things that can only be done in one of them.

27:10.70
Jon
Yeah.

27:17.17
Jon
Yeah.

27:17.37
Kevin Wee
And it’s very annoying to have to figure out what they are.

27:20.62
Jon
Yeah, I think that’s I think that that’s a really good point. But I think that’s also true across lots of tools. Like I was like, I was just working just finishing a paper with colleagues at at at work. And we were trying to do things in word online, like on the equation editor. And I know there are people rolling their eyes at doing equations in Microsoft Word, but like You could not do it in the online version. So I do it on the desktop version, but then when uploading it back to the online version, it would break. And so I think there’s that, like, that’s kind of feels like a common problem right now.

27:54.74
Kevin Wee
Yeah, it’s a common problem. However, does does the user base mainly focus on mainly focus on one of them?

28:06.41
Jon
Right. Right.

28:06.82
Kevin Wee
feel like if Let me use Figma as an example. Figma has a desktop app, and they also have a web app. But I bet like most people are using the web app.

28:15.57
Jon
Yeah, right.

28:16.28
Kevin Wee
So that one better have the most functionality compared to the rest.

28:18.84
Jon
Right. Yeah.

28:20.63
Kevin Wee
I feel like because Tableau’s user base, like day-to-day users, not those that use for fun, um they are quite evenly across all these channels, all these different applications.

28:32.94
Kevin Wee
So how do they balance that?

28:37.61
Jon
Right.

28:37.96
Kevin Wee
And if they were to always highlight these four products, then they need to do they need to improve the consistency between them.

28:45.72
Jon
Mm hmm.

28:45.81
Kevin Wee
And I think there are a lot of, I know that there are a lot of efforts at the back end to try to, you know, make these consistent, I just wish this is just me wishing it to come sooner.

28:54.38
Jon
Right.

28:59.90
Kevin Wee
How about that?

29:00.26
Jon
Yeah, yeah, I hear that. I hear that for sure.

29:03.77
Kevin Wee
Yeah. Yeah.

29:04.19
Jon
um but So so we’re so at the beginning of the year here, what do you Do you have guesses on what you, or, or where do you think Tableau is heading as a tool now? I mean, we could call it a company as part of Salesforce. Like where do you think it’s heading and where would you like it to head? I mean, obviously having these, as you just mentioned, having all these different versions, a little bit more, uh, better handshakes between them, but like, where do you see it going? Where do you hope it’s going to go? Do you have any fears about where it’s going to go in this new world of,

29:39.26
Jon
you know, AI cloud within Salesforce, like what do you what do you think is going to happen over the next next year?

29:46.83
Kevin Wee
i think I think inevitably it would be very, very AI-focused. um

29:53.37
Jon
e

29:55.01
Kevin Wee
for good reasons, right? Because it’s a new tool, everybody wants to use it. um However, I think what I would like to see more in the future, it’s that with the AI, would you be able to develop a system telling the analysts how to place themselves in this using like a lot of Tableau’s recent demonstration, you will see that it’s all about executive using the AI ah in Tableau to figure out what it is.

30:25.16
Jon
Mm hmm.

30:27.44
Kevin Wee
But we know that in real life data sets often very inconsistent, very dirty, ah very problematic. So how can analysts join this conversation and become a safeguard um to making sure that the data that they receive or interprets are proper. I think that that conversation, you haven’t seen that much um in all of the promotion materials.

30:54.20
Kevin Wee
I think they know they need to do it. But of course, ultimately, it’s the ex executive that paid a bill, right? So the commercials have to be very focusing on them.

30:59.46
Jon
Right, right. Yeah.

31:01.95
Kevin Wee
But I feel like then for analysts, is there anything that you can tell us to make sure that the data that we feed into the system is correct? How to troubleshoot the data sets? If someone proposed to, you know, contradicting metrics or formulas, how do we use Tableau to, you know, harmonize everything?

31:19.73
Kevin Wee
um These are

31:20.33
Jon
yeah

31:23.10
Kevin Wee
this is not gonna go away. Like big companies gonna have data sets, multiple data source that are not talking to each other. So how do we ah play the analyst role back into the conversation? ah That’s something that I am, ah I wanna see more.

31:37.78
Jon
Yeah, yeah that’s really that’s really interesting. I mean, I’ll ask you one one one last question. So back to your your podcasting project, you you kind of ended up building the code.

31:48.86
Jon
to get the data through chat GPT. Do you foresee a world where you would be able to do that task directly through Tableau and have the data populate directly in Tableau? or or and And let me also ask, like that sounds great, but you just mentioned how data is messy and difficult needs to be cleaned. Do you think that even that that should be possible or should be harder for people because then it forces them to be more careful with the data?

32:16.29
Kevin Wee
I think currently everybody ah currently a lot of criticisms received by this AI models are that um it doesn’t tell you how confident it is.

32:27.59
Kevin Wee
It always sounded very confident.

32:28.03
Jon
Yeah. Yeah. Always very confident.

32:29.91
Kevin Wee
so

32:30.64
Jon
Yeah.

32:31.91
Kevin Wee
Yeah, so when the like I don’t want you to always give me a number. I want you to tell me if this data set maybe like in ah has some flaws. You need to tell me that today we only receive 50% of the records as usual.

32:46.43
Kevin Wee
But this is the number that we calculated or computed based on the result. But FYI, we are missing 50% of the data set.

32:51.91
Jon
Right. Yeah. Yeah.

32:54.88
Kevin Wee
I feel like the FYI part, it’s never mentioned in any of the results from chat GPT. To be frank, um the Spotify data, I use chat GPT, the coding was perfect. But for the other project that I had, I made for Ironviz, those are data from IMDB and Wikipedia. Chat GPT couldn’t solve the coding issue, even though it spit up a code that wrote like that was written so organizedly.

33:21.80
Kevin Wee
I couldn’t run it at all. I had to use Google AI.

33:23.57
Jon
hu Yeah, wow.

33:26.40
Kevin Wee
like Come on, friend. Let’s get one more.

33:28.10
Jon
Yeah.

33:28.69
Kevin Wee
And then I had to compare the codes one by one. So now I am the analyst trying to harmonize these two systems.

33:31.04
Jon
ah Right. Right.

33:35.49
Kevin Wee
Because these two systems, even though they will spit out perfect answers, seemingly perfect answers, so money to be able to tell someone to be able to validate and test them.

33:42.98
Jon
Right.

33:46.40
Kevin Wee
And I think i foresee that to be my role in the future.

33:46.52
Jon
Yeah.

33:49.96
Jon
That’s great. Well, i love the I love the future-looking piece of this. ah Kevin, thanks so much for for coming on the show. um I’ll put ah links to your ah your podcast ah dashboard and your Tableau Public and your site on the on the show notes, so people should be sure to check that out.

34:05.15
Jon
ah Thanks a lot. I will see you at Tableau conference in a few months, and I’ll talk to you soon.

34:09.57
Kevin Wee
and Sure. Yeah. Talk to you soon. It’s very nice to be on the podcast. Finally. Thanks for having me.

34:16.27
Jon
All right, thanks.