Thankful Thursday – Lindsey Poulter

I think my first exposure to Lindsey Poulter‘s work was a March Madness viz I found when I was doing some research for my own viz in early 2017. It was simple, clean, and packed a lot of data in a fairly small space. My first go at a March Madness viz the year before was an explosion of every type of metric I could think of, so the clean simplicity of Lindsey’s viz was very eye-opening for me. I think it was also when I realized I could use a different font and/or and image in the title to spice things up a bit. My resulting viz was a much more focused, cleaner take on March Madness than my first.

Lindsey’s take on the Washington Metro Scorecard was the inspiration behind Andy Kriebel’s new way to visualize an income statement, which I have often used when talking about visualization in the Finance dept I work in. Once again, clean, focused, and full of information in a small space without feeling cluttered.

Lindsey didn’t really publish much for a year and a half, but when she started up again, she blew my mind. When Set Actions became a thing in Tableau, I had kind of a hard time wrapping my head around what they could really do. Then tweet after tweet (after tweet) from Lindsey allowed me to really understand the true power and possibilities created through Set Actions. When I started our internal Ancestry TUG last year, we were getting ready to upgrade our Server, so I decided to show some of the things possible in 2019.1. I basically just downloaded Lindsey’s whole Set Actions workbook  and picked 5 or 6 examples to demonstrate the power of what was possible to our group.

At TC19, in addition to watching her get oohs and ahhs  during Iron Viz, I had a couple opportunities to chat with her for a bit. For as amazingly good at Tableau as she is, and the “celebrity” that she is now in the Tableau Community, she is one of the most humble and unassuming people you could ever meet. She lets her work speak for itself.

So thanks, Lindsey, for everything you contribute to this community.