DataFam Rising Stars: Adam Mico on why it exists, and two Viz of the Day builds pulled apart

0:03 In the dark,

0:07 you can see them.

0:13 Little lights getting brighter.

0:19 DataFam.

0:24 Look up.

0:30 Ooh. Oh.

0:34 Stars in the darkness.

0:38 Watch them come alive.

0:41 One by one they're rising.

0:44 Lighting up the sky.

0:47 A- a- Adam's got the vision.

0:49 Eyes on what's next. Data, cloud, AI.

0:53 Putting Tableau to the test. North Star of the DataFam. Lighting up the night. He started Rising Stars.

1:04 Now watch them take flight. If you look into the darkness. You can see them come alive. There's a whole new constellation.

1:17 Rising in the sky.

1:20 It's DataFam Rising Stars.

1:24 Burning through the night. Turning data into stories. Making insights come alive. It's DataFam Rising Stars.

1:35 Shining from afar. From the dashboard to the cosmos. Look up.

1:41 There they are. O- O- Ollie's on the tee box. The course is in his sights. 18 holes, one viz. Every tee time shines. Check the course, pick your time, see the status glow. Hole in one design, now it's time to go. DataFam Rising Stars.

1:57 Burning through the night. Turning data into stories. Making insights come alive. It's DataFam Rising Stars.

2:08 Shining from afar. From the dashboard to the cosmos. Look up.

2:15 There they are.

2:28 Rash's got the numbers, workouts in his sights. Muscle maps and PRs, everything displayed just right. Check the sets, watch the reps, watch the numbers rise. Viz of the Day, lighting up the skies.

2:42 Maybe you're a star.

2:45 Maybe you don't know it yet. Maybe your next viz is the one that we won't forget.

2:57 It's DataFam Rising Stars.

3:01 Burning through the night.

3:03 Turning data into stories. Making insights come alive. It's DataFam Rising Stars.

3:12 Shining from afar.

3:14 From the dashboard to the cosmos. Look up. There they are.

3:26 Look up. There, there they are. DataFam

3:37 Rising Stars.

3:47 Lisa Trescott: Welcome, everyone, to the August 2026 meeting of the Tableau Public TUG, where we have a stellar meeting planned for you today. Because if you could tell from the song, we are celebrating DataFam Rising Stars. This is the initiative formerly known as Tableau Next, until Tableau loved that name and took it for themselves.

4:12 Uh, Rising Stars is an initiative that aims to really shine light on folks who are pushing the DataFam forward, uh, with their work and their leadership, and who have yet to be named ambassadors and visionaries.

4:25 So our star-studded lineup today includes none other than Adam Mico. He is the founder of DataFam Rising Stars, and he will be in our community spotlight today.

4:37 And we also have two members of the 2026 Rising Stars cohort joining us as our Viz of the Day authors. We have Ollie Ross Russell. He's gonna be teeing up his golf club overview dashboard, and Rosh Khan will be take us behind the scenes of his out of this world gym tracker dashboard.

4:57 And before we get to that main event, just a quick intro of our Tableau Public TUG team will be leading you on this trip through the DataFam galaxy of stars. Uh, I am Lisa Trescott. I'm joined by Preethi Lodha, Rob Taylor, and Eric Howard today.

5:13 Uh, for each of us, just a little bit more about me. I'm a research analyst at MiraCosta College, which is in San Diego. It's North County San Diego. Um, I've been there since 2017, and that is where I started with Tableau.

5:27 Um, and since then, I've become an ambassador, a visionary, a Iron Viz winner back in 2021.

5:34 Here are some of my favorite vizs, uh, from my Tableau Public profile. They're ones that I just had a lot of fun with. Um, I really enjoy using Tableau Public as kind of just a creative playground to have fun with data and flex creative muscles.

5:49 Uh, over to Preethi.

5:53 Preethi Lodha: Thank you, Lisa. Hello, everyone. I'm Preethi Lodha. I'm the Director of Data Analytics and Operations, uh, also at, in a higher ed institution, University of Massachusetts. I'm currently in Boston, Massachusetts, and I also serve as the Tableau Public am- ta- Tableau ambassador. We went away with the, uh, groupings, um- Those are some of my vizs that have won awards and have been printed or have been posted on to, uh, some of the media channels.

6:27 So do engage with it. The fun fact is how Americans spend their money visualization has over a million views. So if you are ever interested in knowing if your spending is on par, check that out. It is very old data, I should refresh it, but it is always a fun ask to see, right? A million views. So excited to do the hosting segment today.

6:50 Rob Taylor: Awesome.

6:52 Hi, everyone. I'm Rob Taylor. Um, by day, I'm a specialist BI analyst for JLL, who are a property management company, and I work with Rolls-Royce's buildings, help them analyze their data.

7:03 Um, by night, I love playing on Tableau Public, building all sorts of wacky vizs, pushing my skills, trying to learn how to do new things from everyone in the community.

7:12 Uh, so particularly love being part of this, um, TUG, 'cause I love Tableau Public. I'm a two-time ambassador.

7:18 Um, got a few viz of the Days, and this year I was b- was in the top 10 for High-End viz. So been a really good year, love being part of it.

7:27 Over to you, Eric.

7:30 Eric Howard: Well, thanks. I'm Eric Howard. Uh, I'm a Tableau Ambassador and, uh, leader of the Nashville TUG and this TUG, and, uh, spoke at a few Tableau conferences now. In TC'26, I talked on AI for the Tableau site admin. At our last Nashville TUG, I did a whole presentation on the Tableau data modeling from your basic joins up through, uh, composable data sources, so.

8:00 Lisa Trescott: Awesome. So that is your Tableau Public TUG team. Just one quick announcement before we get going, and that is Dreamforce is less than a month away. It's gonna be taking place in San Francisco, uh, September 15th through 17th. I will be there, as will Adam Mico, our Community Spotlight member today. So, uh, we hope that we will see you there. There's still plenty of time to register, and you can join me and the rest of the DataFam up in San Francisco in a few weeks.

8:29 Okay, let's meet our Community Spotlight member for today. So Adam Mico is probably somebody who looks pretty familiar and you probably recognize because he has been the North Star in the DataFam for some time, but has recently joined Salesforce as the director of product management within the Data Cloud organization and working with Tableau and AI.

8:49 He spent many years in the Tableau ecosystem, including several as Visionary Innovator, uh, building the platform, and more recently exploring what's possible when you pair Tableau with AI.

9:01 Outside of his product work, Adam founded and leads DataFam Rising Stars, a program that was built to recognize and elevate emerging voices in the DataFam community.

9:11 So thank you so much for being here, Adam. Welcome.

9:15 Adam Mico: Uh, yes. Uh, thank you so much for having me.

9:18 Uh, unfortunately, uh, today I'm on my phone because the hotel room reception is not great. So again, uh, appreciate you having me.

9:27 Lisa Trescott: No worries. We're just glad you were able to make it.

9:30 So we always ask our Community Spotlight kind of first off, how and when did you start using Tableau, and what background really kind of even led you to discover it in the first place?

9:41 Adam Mico: Uh, it's a great question. My crew is completely different than, uh, the career that I, uh, um, ended up having. Uh, I was a, uh, an adjudicator. I was making decisions on unemployment insurance claims. I just, uh, was the person in the office that knew how to work with Excel. Uh, so they wanted to utilize a BI platform, and it's like, "Adam, um, we have these options.

10:05 You can go with Business Objects, SAP Business Objects or Tableau." Uh, had a, a look at them, and, uh, decided very quickly Tableau was gonna be the tool, and that was back in 2011. Uh, so… And I remember that because I took a picture of Tableau. I… 'Cause I did an internet search on my, uh, phone back then, and was able to find, um… It was timestamped at 2011, um, when I was first introduced to Tableau.

10:30 And then, um, my… It was a mind-blowing experience at that time. So that allowed me to really, um, gain a new passion at a time where I didn't think, uh, new passions were gainable. I was in my mid-40s at that point.

10:45 Lisa Trescott: That's amazing. I feel like so many of us started as the Excel

10:47 Adam Mico: Or late 30s rather. Sorry.

10:51 Lisa Trescott: So that's kind of how you got introduced to Tableau, but then tell us a little bit about your journey within the community, like from that first, you know, Tableau Public viz-

10:57 Adam Mico: Right

10:57 Lisa Trescott: … to then ultimately becoming a Visionary.

11:01 Adam Mico: Uh, great question. So, uh, I started with the community in, uh, 2019. I remember being bored at work. I reclassed to the highest point that I could reclass to, and I'm like, "There's really nowhere to go. Maybe I can give back." Uh, I realized very quickly that my design skills weren't great, so I had much to learn because I was learning in a silo.

11:21 I was do- uh, finding tutorials by Andy Kriebel or Ken Flerlage, um, a, a number of times before that, but I wasn't really thinking about design and how am I producing to make things, uh, uh, visually acceptable and even likable by a general audience. And, uh, realized quickly that I can give back some, but I could also learn quite a bit, and that's what it reignited, uh, or ignited my passion for the DataFam.

11:46 And the other thing, it was my last opportunity to really wanna join a community. I'm autistic, and I learned I was autistic a few years before that, um, via diagnosis, and I wanted to give a community a, a, a last chance for me to be part of something rather than just be a hermit. So it really gave me an opportunity to blossom and be my authentic self.

12:08 Lisa Trescott: I love it. I love that so much.

12:10 Because many of us do, myself included, know you as a community leader first. You were one of my first people that I was kind of introduced to in the community. So what has it been like kind of transitioning from being someone who was advocating For Tableau from the outside-

12:24 Adam Mico: Mm-hmm

12:24 Lisa Trescott: … and now you're kind of helping shape from within Salesforce.

12:28 Adam Mico: Uh, Salesforce and I partner with Tableau quite a bit too. Uh, it's, it's a lot of fun because you have an opportunity to see more of what you were guessing at before. There are things that people are doing and, uh, opportunities that you didn't know peop- they were thinking about. So there's a lot of things that are in process and being worked on that you had no idea that they were really even considering at that point.

12:51 And it kind of goes case in point when you saw the Tableau keynote this year, that the focus was not just on Tableau Next, it was incorporating everything in every product in Tableau so people al- all have a scaled experience, um, regardless of where you're at. And that's kind of… That's been interesting to be part of that and seeing how that's, uh, flourished.

13:13 Lisa Trescott: What's kind of been maybe the biggest surprise about moving from the community to the company side?

13:20 Adam Mico: So I wouldn't say this is a surprise, but, um, learning how much they really care about each concern a customer has. Uh, 'cause you can't…

13:31 You know they care, and they talk about things, and they work on some of the big problems, but they also look at all the, the quote, unquote, "small problems" that a lot of companies wouldn't even factor in and discard. Um, they try to, they try to look at everything to see if there's a way they could incorporate it into, you know, what's happening now or what's happening soon.

13:51 Um, I don't hear many nos. I hear, "Not yet," um, depending on priorities and so forth. So that's an incredible thing to see internally is, like, uh, how motivated people are to make sure that they make every customer happy.

14:06 Lisa Trescott: That's really nice to hear. I feel like especially for m- such a large company like Salesforce, to know that-

14:12 Adam Mico: Yeah

14:12 Lisa Trescott: … they're still listening to us. That's nice. That's good to know.

14:14 Adam Mico: Yes.

14:16 Lisa Trescott: Okay, so today we are celebrating DataFam Rising Stars. You started it all. So tell us kind of how it started and what inspired you to create it.

14:26 Adam Mico: Uh, another great question. So, uh, back in, I believe it was 2020, I created something to have the community be involved in, uh, uh, about sharing their thanks for Tableau and what makes them thankful about Tableau. Between that time and the first iteration of DataFam Rising Stars, there were people that, uh, res- that were passed over, quote, unquote, "for ambassador and visionary." Um, and there were…

14:52 Uh, there's a lot of disappointment in the community, so I felt, I- I- I felt it was difficult for me to see that and, um, because so many people are making great, great, uh, contributions. But what's, what's missing is, uh, not everybody could be celebrated in the same way because it wouldn't be the same type of celebration at that point. So I wanna encourage people to continue doing work because a lot of people that are DataFam Rising Stars, they're just ambassadors or visionaries in waiting.

15:23 Um, maybe they don't know that yet. So it's important for me to make sure that they were, uh, given a platform so they could continue doing, uh, what they're doing to make them stand out.

15:35 Lisa Trescott: That's really great. And at… So I was part of a Rising Stars cohort in the, in the early days. It is very meaningful. Right? When you haven't, you know, gotten any of those Tableau accolades yet, it really meant something to be part of that. So for me, personally, thank you for, for doing this.

15:50 Adam Mico: Thank you.

15:52 Lisa Trescott: What does it mean to you to be a Rising Star?

15:57 Adam Mico: So I never had the opportunity to be a Rising Star myself. Um, but w- what it means to me is that I see how many people are so thankful and appreciative of being recognized. It's not a Tableau or a company inspired recognition, it's a community inspired recognition, and that kind of makes it special in its own self. There's no winners or losers. There's only winners in, in each cohort, and it's important that they're, um, they're showcased individually.

16:27 I've always ranked them alphabetically as opposed to any sort of order, uh, 'cause I wanna make sure everybody had equal billing. Uh, because, because your… Somebody's work can be a little bit different, but it doesn't make it less relevant, and I wanna showcase that. Some people may have 10,000 followers on LinkedIn, and some people may have 30.

16:46 Um, it doesn't matter how many followers. You could still make an impact if you impact one person. And like 80% of the people that are on, um, DataFam Rising Stars, they were nominated by someone else. I encourage self-nominations as well, uh, but most of them, uh, at least 80% of them are, uh, um, nominated by someone else. So they made that, that impact with the, with the community somehow and maybe not even realizing it.

17:13 Lisa Trescott: Yeah. A lot of times we don't see ourselves as that until someone says, "No, you, you are that person for me."

17:20 Adam Mico: Well, I certainly didn't see myself as a, an ambassador-

17:23 Lisa Trescott: Yeah

17:23 Adam Mico: … or a visionary. I was like, um, I, I remember Michael, um, Sandberg, he… I had an original, um, blog with him, and he interviewed me, and he's like, "Uh, what would your goal be in some distant future?" I'm like, "Hopefully, I could be an ambassador someday." I didn't expect anything else. I was just proud to be part of the community.

17:42 Lisa Trescott: Yeah.

17:43 So like you said, there are tons of talented people in the DataFam.

17:47 Adam Mico: Mm-hmm.

17:47 Lisa Trescott: So when you're looking at all the nominations that are coming through, what kind of makes someone go from they're a great contributor to actual Rising Star?

17:57 Adam Mico: So this is an important distinction for me, uh, is that I'm looking for ways to include people rather than exclude people. So are they making… So here's a couple things I'm looking at. What's the consistency of their contributions? Are they making contributions? Um, are they making contributions Potentially in other spaces that aren't as recognized.

18:19 So for example, Tableau Public is a great, uh, place to connect and collaborate and so forth. But if you're making YouTube videos or if you're making blog posts and not really posting a lot in Tableau Public, we wanna make sure those people have voices as well, because they're equally doing something that's impactful for them and that they're passionate about, and have the potential to do something unique and different.

18:41 So I wanna encourage everybody, and that's my platform is, like, I wanna include as many people as possible, and try to exclude as few. And primarily exclusions would be people that are ambassadors, visionaries, or, uh, those that have, uh, um, th- those that work for Salesforce or Tableau.

19:04 Lisa Trescott: Yeah. I love your stance on inclusion. It's, it's really beautiful to see.

19:08 Are there any kind of examples of contributions that, that might be overlooked, but really-

19:15 Adam Mico: Yeah

19:15 Lisa Trescott: … kind of stand out to you when you're kind of looking through the nominations?

19:18 Adam Mico: Yeah. Um, sometimes, i- a, a lot of people think about, you know, "Do I have this huge network? Do I have this huge following?" But a ton of people are doing great work that may not have a great following at a certain point, like, at the point that they're nominated. But it takes, you know, some niche that they need to fill or s- some consistency or more consistency on their part, uh, to get to that next, uh, level.

19:45 Uh, so that's kind of one thing. And another thing is that there were people, uh, like Luigi, who is a friend of mine, um, San Diego TUG leader. Everybody knows who he is. He wasn't an ambassador for a long time, and I felt bad seeing that. Um, and he finally got recognized and he got his opportunity to shine, but it took a long time for that, and I wanna make sure people like him w- were not lost in the shuffle, and, and that they were celebrated for what they did with the community.

20:14 Lisa Trescott: Yeah.

20:14 Adam Mico: And he's done a lot. So, I'm teared up.

20:17 Lisa Trescott: He has. Shout out to Luigi and San Diego TUG. Uh, Luigi's one of, like, the hardest working TUG leaders I think there is, so. So yeah.

20:24 Adam Mico: And there are many others like that, but that's just an example, because he was part of the community well before I was. Yeah.

20:30 Lisa Trescott: Yeah.

20:33 So, like we've mentioned, you are now on the Salesforce side of things, so-… are you gonna continue to run Rising Stars, or kind of what's the future of, of the initiative?

20:42 Adam Mico: So unfortunately, I can't personally run it. Um, I can't lead TUGs, I can't do community quote unquote "sponsored events" because of my role at Salesforce and my partnership with Tableau. So it kind of takes me out of the running for that. But right now I want to make sure that this continues. I want to give you all the tools possible to make sure that it, it, it maintains, and that you have the ability and, uh, capability of, of running this.

21:08 So please, uh, reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm opening up for anybody that is considering wanting to run this initiative. I'll give you the forms, I'll advise. I just can't be part of the selection process. I'll even promote.

21:21 But I can't be part of the selection process.

21:25 Lisa Trescott: Awesome. Well, we'll put your LinkedIn information in the chat so people have it, so they can reach out if they are interested in being the new leader of this initiative.

21:33 Adam Mico: Or co-leader, yeah.

21:35 Lisa Trescott: Or co-leader.

21:36 So lastly, you know, a lot of folks don't get involved in the DataFam for a long time, myself included.

21:42 Adam Mico: Right.

21:42 Lisa Trescott: It sounds like you had a big gap between 2011-

21:45 Adam Mico: Yeah

21:45 Lisa Trescott: … through, I think you said 2017.

21:47 Adam Mico: 2019, yeah.

21:48 Lisa Trescott: 19. So what advice would you give someone who wants to become more involved but doesn't really know where to start?

21:55 Adam Mico: So, uh, one of the good things, and this is the proper TUG to do it, is start developing, uh, Tableau, uh, data visualizations and, uh, p- publishing on, uh, Tableau Public.

22:06 Uh, you may be doing same initiatives everybody else is doing, but it gives you an opportunity to share your voice. Um, sharing your visualizations, uh, supporting others and encouraging, um, learning, not just for yourself, but helping other people learn as well, is a great way to get started. Um, a great part about this community is the selflessness of its members.

22:29 Meaning that they're out to support each other. You have a safety net. You don't feel like anybody's judging you. Um, and that was a big part of what helped me thrive in the community, because I didn't feel like I was being judged for what I was or what I wasn't, I was just able to, um, be part of something and grow and learn, um, with everybody else.

22:49 And I just think it's an opportunity not only to, um, have, uh, be part of DataFam Rising Stars ambassador or visionary, it's an opportunity for learning and growth. And my biggest growth experience as a person has been part of this community.

23:06 Lisa Trescott: That's so wonderful. Thank you so much, Adam. It is always a joy to talk to you. Um, we are so lucky that you were able to take the time, uh, and chat with us today. So thank you for being here. Thank you for starting Rising Stars, and for highlighting all of these voices in the community. We really, we really appreciate you.

23:24 Adam Mico: Thank you so much, Lisa, and, uh, Tableau Public TUG team.

23:28 Bye.

23:29 Preethi Lodha: Okay. Uh, thank you, Lisa. Uh, while we give the opportunity for Rosh to pull up and share his screen, so if we can stop the share.

23:42 That's great. Okay.

23:44 While Rosh does that, uh, I'm quickly gonna introduce him to the TUG.

23:50 Uh, Rosh's journey into the data hasn't followed a traditional path. He began his career in recruitment, helping companies build and scale their data and technology teams.

24:02 Uh, through that experience, he became interested by the work his clients were doing Which inspired him to learn Tableau on the side and transition into analytics.

24:12 Which, uh, emboldens my claim that there is no singular path to data, you can come from any field, uh, that you are working in currently.

24:21 Um, more on Rosh. After joining the Information Lab in 2025, Rosh completed the Data Schools training program in Tableau, Alteryx and SQL and consulting. So today he works as a technical lead at major telecom companies, uh, delivering data engineering projects and helping modernize data platforms.

24:42 While his day-to-day work is mainly focused on data engineering, Tableau remains his passion for design, art and storytelling with data.

24:51 Rosh is also passionate about enabling others in the data community. He has written over 45 plus technical blogs, trained and upskilled over 3,000 people in Tableau, 300 people in Tableau, 3,000 would be the next-

25:07 Rosh Khan: One day would be the dream

25:08 Preethi Lodha: … That's it, yeah. I, I'm, I'm making your goals for future.

25:13 And his work has been recognized with two viz of the Days and a 2026 Tableau Rising Star Award.

25:22 Outside of the work, Rosh enjoys traveling, hiking, daily crosswords and, spoiler alert, keeping active in gym.

25:30 So we are excited, uh, for his Viz of the Day, the Gym Tracker, that he is gonna share with us. Welcome, Rosh.

25:38 Rosh Khan: Spoiler alert indeed. Thank you. Thank you very much, Preethi. Um, don't think I could have done a better job myself, giving, giving an intro. Can I, can I start with, with the fact that the song at the start, oh my God, I, I loved it to bits. I am definitely putting that on my next Teams meeting. That's, it's gonna be my new intro theme song.

25:59 Preethi Lodha: It, it sets the mood, right? It bo- it makes an special appearance. I, I'm saying… I'm, I've been telling Lisa that she needs to make music for all of us so that we just start playing them whenever we start talking.

26:10 Rosh Khan: It is great. I'm gonna find excuses to come on to every Tableau Public talk and just get new intro songs off myself.

26:17 Um, but yeah, th- thank you very much, Preethi. Um, yeah, as, as Preethi said, my name's Rosh. I work for the Information Lab, which is actually the same company that Ollie Ross Russell works for.

26:29 Um, I've got a, I've got a bit of a jam-packed session, um, for the next 30 minutes. So I'll, I'll start with the, with the, with the, uh, uh, gym track Viz of the Day. Just give you a quick, uh, run through of what that looks like in case you haven't seen it already.

26:44 Um, and then take a bit of a step back and, and talk more on the ideas side of thing, the, the, the visual inspiration, the data collection, modeling, um, and then go into a more of a demo, um, also almost like a tutorial style Tableau demo of how I made, uh, made some of the elements there. And then if we have time at the end, I would love to show you this, this thing and this world of Inkscape, SVGs, XML.

27:12 Um, but without further ado, let me get my screen across.

27:18 So th- this is the dashboard, um, it's called Hevy Gym Tracker.

27:22 Why it's called Hevy, I'll, we'll get onto that in just a moment. Um, but like any of my other dashboards, um, it, it starts with a, a section at the top, which is a high level overview into my workouts that I'm doing. Um, and then it has a, a, almost a Z style pattern and a follow through and a funnel of how I break that down into smaller and then smaller chunks.

27:45 So on the top left you've, on the top left you've got this calendar style widget, which, uh, tells me how many days for that month I worked out. I can go back and go across multiple, uh, uh, go across months in, in, in the back.

27:58 Uh, you've got these KPIs that are going on, and I can select, um, another metric to then populate the, the bar chart that's going on on the right-hand side.

28:08 Throughout the dashboard I've got, um, sort of metrics and comparisons that are going across this month compared to the previous month.

28:15 Um, from that high level view, you go onto this, um, breakdown of the push-pull leg split, um, including the abs as well.

28:25 Uh, I've got a one rep max comparison. I know a lot of people going to gym care about their one rep maxes and how much they can lift.

28:32 Um, so I've got that going on compared to… my best month compared to this current month. And I'm gonna have to give a bit of a disclaimer at this point, because when I posted this on LinkedIn, Andy Kriebel, he reposted it saying that, "This is… Look how amazing this is. This is my data." Um, that would be almost true, except there's nowhere in this world that I'm doing 60 kg on bench and then doing 115 on a deadlift and squat.

28:58 Um, it is, it is, it is part of my data, but I, I, I did use, uh, a ChatGPT to, to densify it, 'cause you will not catch me doing legs on a, on a gym day. No. Um, and then the, I remember there were a few people in the comments calling this out, saying that I've got a really odd, uh, ratio between my chest strength and to my squat and deadlift. So putting that right at the start.

29:23 Um, and then we come onto this, uh, this body map, which in my opinion is, is the star of the show. A lot of people asking me about how I made this, asking if I was using extensions or I was using Pythons to come across with the data. It's a lot simpler than you think. Um, and, and I'll, I'll go through that towards the later part of it.

29:44 Um, got the option to switch it from a body map to a radar chart, um, showing the same information, but just in a different view, and it adds the element of ranking going on as well. So one being the most amount of, uh, sets done for this particular muscle, 13 being the lowest.

30:02 I believe this body map is also interactive. So you can click on something like-

30:08 Chest and the chart on the right should update to only those muscles being worked out and different metrics across that. Finally, you can click on a, a particular workout I'm doing and see how that's changing across, across different months as well.

30:25 So this is, um, this is a dashboard.

30:28 It's got a bit of a funny story as to how it came together. Uh, one day I was at a gym with a friend, um, that I've been friends with for about 15 years now, and this person is quite– he's quite– he, he's an interesting character. He's, he's anti-corporate, anti-LinkedIn, anti-meetings, and a lot of the things that are posted on LinkedIn, he makes fun out of.

30:49 So one day I was doing a workout with him, um, and using this app called Hevy, which is where I collected this data from.

30:56 Uh, I came across a couple of metrics, and I was thinking, "Hmm, you know, it'd be quite nice if I saw this trending across different months, how it compared to, uh, last month to date and so on." And he made a joke about, "Oh, you should make one of your Tableau dashboards on it." And I was like, "Do you know what? That, that's a bloody brilliant, brilliant, brilliant idea.

31:15 I will do so." Uh, that's how it started. A couple of months later, many monsters down, uh, many of hours into it, this is what I came up with.

31:24 Um, let me show you what that app that I'm talking about. So once again, um, I– all, all of the, all of the data came from an app called Hevy, which is a-an app that lets you track your gym workouts, um, and essentially shows you your progress, um, over time. And I've got that website right here.

31:45 And as soon as you go to the website, you sort of see where the visual, the design, um, inspiration came from. You've got elements of, uh, data being displayed, data being vis-vis-visualized. You've got a, uh, that calendar widget that I was talking about.

32:01 I can click on a particular, uh, workout, and it shows me what I was doing that day.

32:08 Um, that sort of applies across different things as well. So if I go to shoulder…

32:15 I have been slacking, I apologize, but work's been busy. Um, so it's, it's got some elements of, of data and visualization going on already.

32:24 Um, so when I was going through all of these, uh, what, what I like to call an initial research, um, I had a few things in mind.

32:36 I wanted to put these together in some sort of a mood board style document.

32:40 Um, and, and I was thinking, "Okay, you know, is, is, what's working?

32:46 What's not working? If it's not working, why is it not working? How can I visualize it differently? Um, am I trying to reinvent the wheel, uh, or do I need to keep things simple?" And I was– with, with this, uh, visual, um, inspiration and, and guide, I was trying to balance those things. And there was an element of trying to challenge myself, um, technically as well.

33:10 Um, and I, and I'm gonna– some people are gonna hate me for saying this, but I, I– for this one, I didn't really plan, I didn't wireframe or get, get a nice design together. I just picked one thing, made it, and went on to other, went on to the other, see what, what was wrong with it, and just sort of continued building on it.

33:29 Um, so if you are my head coach, um, in this call and listening to me, please ignore that. I did plan. Um, we'll, we'll take, we'll take the widget, for example, uh, the, the calendar widget. It's clean, it's simple, it's nice. Uh, it's something I haven't done in Tableau before, though. Um, and I started looking online, Andy Kriebel, great tutorial by Andy Kriebel on how to do one of those.

33:51 So I put that in my, um, resources to then make on later. On the bottom left, you've got something that almost looks like a table. Um, and, and when I'm building my Tableau dashboards, I don't particularly, um,

34:08 I don't particularly like tables in my dashboards. I know sometimes the-they are necessary. Um, but if I can try to uplift the table in any way, I would do so.

34:16 Uh, and I believe this is Sam Parsons, do correct me if I'm wrong, but Sam Parsons has got a great, uh, set of tutorials on how he makes his super tables.

34:24 Um, got a bar chart in the middle.

34:27 It's simple, it's effective. Uh, the only thing I thought it was missing was that it's showing duration, it's showing reps, but s-not some of the other metrics I'd be interested in. So I started thinking of bringing those together as well.

34:39 Um, a line chart on the top right, it works, it's simple, kept it how it was.

34:45 Uh, and then we come to more on, on the, the, the biggest technical challenge for me. We've got, um, a body map, which I think works great in this area. The only thing is Tableau is not really native to body maps.

34:59 It can do other things, it can do hacky things, or we can make it behave in a different way. Um, how do I go about doing this? Um, and this was where I put most of the research. Uh, the one I found the most helpful was a blog by Shreya Arya. Um, she used a website called CBI Studio, which I'll be showing you later as well, on how you convert images into, um, custom shapes or custom polygons.

35:26 Um, and then finally on the bottom right, bar chart. This is maybe where I, um, over-engineered a little bit. But, uh, whenever I see any sports illustrations, I do associate radar charts with it for some reason. Um, and I've never made a radar chart before, so I wanted to see if I could make one. Um, and a, and a blog by Ellen Blackburn that helped me here as well.

35:49 All of these things that I'm showing you right now, uh, either myself or Preethi will share at the end. Uh, so don't worry about that. I'll, I'll have that to hand.

35:59 That's– this is the design and the visual side of things. Um, with any dashboard, you've got two sides, the design visual, but then you've got your data collection and modeling as well.

36:10 And this part, um, I've got the data that I was collecting from the app Hevy And I've also lumped in the data that I needed to make this body map together in, in one section.

36:21 Let's go through Hevy. Um, great app. Uh, I'd highly recommend it if you go gym. It is free. Um, in terms of data, you've got two options to export data. You can either go down the CSV route, which is free. You can get it any time.

36:35 Um, I believe as part of GDPR, you… Yeah, you should just be able to, uh, export, uh, from the app.

36:41 Or you've got the API version, which you can get if you are subscribed or paying the premium version of it. Um, I went with the free version, um, and that… Saw that most of the data there worked for me. Uh, put it through Tableau Prep, uh, or if you want to replicate it, you can do it, um, in, in any sort of, uh, data transformation tool, Python, Alteryx, anything else here would work.

37:06 And as mentioned before, I did use AI to, uh, densify a bit of the data, um, so that visually the body map, you know, it looks like a body map.

37:16 Um, and also I used it for one part, which was that Hevy would tell me the workouts that I'm doing and what machines and equipment I'm using. For example, if I'm doing a dumbbell curl, I'm using dumbbells for it.

37:29 The part it didn't tell me was which muscle was being worked out as a result. So dumbbells would be biceps. Um, and what I did in that instance was got ChatGPT to create just a big massive lookup table of all possible workouts that I could be doing, the machines I'll be using, as well as the, um, muscles that are associated with it and the muscles being worked out.

37:54 Um, a bit of time into that got me to a point where I had data that was ready to go.

38:01 And, and this data includes the, uh, days I was working out, uh, an ID for a workout and an ID for a particular exercise, the actual name of the exercise, how many sets I was putting into it, the, the weight, and the reps being done.

38:17 So this is the, um, the… You can call it your, almost your fact table. Uh, this is your fact table ready.

38:24 The other part of the puzzle is, um, a body map. I looked at something on a screen, which was an image, and I needed to be able to convert it to something Tableau could, could easily understand, pick up and visualize.

38:38 Um, and I started reading through those resources, and it came down to a simple formula really. Any image is a pixel that's going across an X and Y-axis. You can track those pixels and, uh, go across those increments and turn them into, um, into your axes.

38:57 If you do that in a sequence, and you capture that sequence, that's the third piece that's missing to convert an image into some sort of shape or polygon. You got your X, Y, and a sequence.

39:11 Uh, and this is– can be done in many ways. The, the route I went down, um, using the blog from Shreya was CBI Studio.

39:19 It's… It is a free, um, tool. It's online, uh, developed by a company called InterWorks, um, and fairly intuitive to use. So I'm just going to give you a quick demo of how this works.

39:33 I'm going to bring in an image that I was using.

39:38 So I've got this image.

39:39 Um, I've selected polygon, and all I really need to do here is roughly start taking

39:50 or sketching over these shapes.

39:52 And as I'm doing that, you'll see on the right you've got an ID for a shape being populated, an X and Y relative to the bottom left of the image. So the bottom left would be a zero, zero, and as it's going up, X and Y is going up.

40:08 Um, and the sequence these points were following. So I was just there clicking on all of these points.

40:17 If I go to Label, um, I can give, uh, each shape an ID. For example, shape zero. Zero was my left back, and shape one was my right shoulder.

40:32 And it's as simple as just hitting Download.

40:39 Getting that data. Uh, you've got a few columns. Um, this can almost be ignored. It's just one column that says polygon.

40:46 But you've got your shape ID, uh, you got the label, X, Y, and the point.

40:52 And the source ended up… Source comes as an empty column. It ended up being quite useful because I was tracking both the front and the back of a body map. So I just ended up calling it something like back because this was the back view, and I just pasted all those values again.

41:09 Now, if you want to do this, and you've got enough hours, and you plot points again and again and again and again, to the point where you've got two thousand nine hundred and forty, um, points that you've plotted, you're ready for a body map.

41:27 Um, again, yeah, this has all the muscles that I could think of, all those muscles labe-labeled, and all the relevant values and columns that I need to plot.

41:37 Now, good thing is this is on Tableau Public, so you can just download and, and, uh, use the data, uh, that, that's sitting with my dashboard.

41:46 Um, and now we've got to the point where we've got, um, I guess, uh, data ready, uh, both from a fact table and, and also from this body map perspective. I'm going to switch over to Tableau now

42:02 and give you just a quick demo of how I translated this into Tableau. So this is what it eventually looks like, um, when you work through, uh, making it.

42:12 It, it… I would say it's fairly simple. There's, there's two routes you could go down. Um, you could go down just making a simple chart that doesn't use map layers, or you could use map layers for it. Um- When I was working with it, I initially started with not using map layers, but I eventually came to a point where I realized that the vision that I've got for this body map would not work, so I switched over, uh, to a map layer.

42:37 But in terms of, um, how you then get it from data into Tableau, um, you'll see that on the top left, uh, you've got a data source, which is body map, uh, and these are the fields that came from CBI Studio as well as some calculated fields I've made that I'll walk you through.

42:56 And I've got my Hevy exercises data, which I've just shrunk down to a few fields, um, just the fields that I need for this.

43:03 So if I bring my X to columns, my Y to rows, bring point ID to path, if I'm right, and shape ID to detail, and it's as… Yeah, it's pretty much as simple as dragging these fours on, and you've got something that resembles a body map.

43:25 Now, I can go ahead and start playing around with the axis to get the right, um, ratio of my, uh, Y and X, um, and, and do a few other things with it. But one issue that I came across here was that I had tracked both the front and the back of the body map, and if I put them on as they normally are, they start to look a little bit messy. I have to filter one out and go with different worksheets, which is fine, and, and there are a few things you can do here to overcome this.

43:57 Uh, but so of this was a point where I realized, okay, I'm going to switch over to, uh, map layers because I know they'll allow me to have a little bit more control and flexibility around what I want to achieve. So I'm now going to show you how I did the map layers.

44:15 Um, we've got an X and Y, and we need to convert them into something that could be understood from a geographic standpoint.

44:22 Uh, and we've got a simple calc called Make Point. Uh, you put your X and Y,

44:28 double-click it, do the same things you did before. So point ID on path, shape ID on detail.

44:36 At this point, I would've expected something to pop up, but I've got, um, three thousand nulls on the bottom right, which maps exactly to how many rows I had going on. And what this is saying is that the longitude generated has null values.

44:52 Um, stumped me here. This stumped me here initially a little bit, but, uh, very quickly realized that X and, uh, latitude and longitude, um, only go from certain values to certain values. So I think they go from negative ninety to positive ninety and negative one eighty to positive one eighty, something along the lines of that.

45:11 And if we look at the data that I'm working with, it's…

45:16 Because it's based on an image and pixels, it's going across hundreds and even sometimes to thousands.

45:22 So these ones here, and that has quite a simple fix. If something's too big, you shrink it down. So

45:33 I've got another calc here, which is almost the same as the one before, Make Point, but I've just divided by two hundred to shrink my X and Y. And if I now put that across,

45:44 I've got something that resembles some sort of a body map. It's not perfect right now. We've got– we're getting the same issue of the front and back being overlaid onto each other.

45:53 Um, and at this point, again, I can either split them into two separate worksheets, or what I could do is I could maybe just… Because I'm working with map layers, I have a little bit more flexibility. I can offset my X angle for one of the views.

46:06 Um, and let me show you my third calculation,

46:12 and this is what that does. So if my source column says the front, which is again being fed from the CBI Excel file, then keep the calculation as it is.

46:24 But if the source says back, just shift the X-axis to the right a little bit.

46:32 If I plot that on, I've, I've got a body map with both front and back. And not only that, I don't have to play around with the X and Y-axis because, uh, it's, it's fixed to a map. It's fixed to coordinates, which, which is great.

46:46 Um, I'm gonna give you one tip over here because I faced an issue when I had this. I was cleaning it up. I was putting nice colors on it, and I eventually got it to my dashboard, and I started playing around with the filters and looking at different dates.

47:00 It looked something like this. Um, in, in a theoretical world, let's say for whatever reason, one month I only work out certain, um, muscles and nothing else, and if I filter to that, this body map suddenly looks quite weird. I mean, I, I know what it is 'cause I've been working with it, but if it's someone else looking at it, they would have no clue what's going on.

47:26 Um, and that's simply because I've filtered out my muscles.

47:30 And, um, thank you to, uh, Ollie, different Ollie, Ollie Clark in my company, um, who gave me, gave me a tip on the fact that map layers can be stacked on top of each other, but they don't need to be connected in any way, shape, or form. What if I duplicate the same map, body map that I've got going on, stick a background and an outline to it, and keep this view that I've got going on at the top?

48:00 And what that looks like is if I right-click this data I've got, just duplicate it, which is what this shows over here, and this data only has, um, points associated with my, with my body map.

48:16 I'm going to bring that same calc that I had before, which looks like this.

48:24 Put it on as a map layer. Now I've got two map layers. One was a– this one was the one that was there before. This is the one that I just dragged on now. Um, going to convert this into a line, bring in some of the same fields I had before, point or path ID on path, uh, shape ID on detail.

48:44 I'm going to reduce the size of the line a little bit and give it a different sharp color so you can see it.

48:51 So now I've got two different map layers.

48:55 One is a red outline, and one is the actual filled version of the, of the muscle.

49:02 I'm going to now bring my filter w-while I'm on this view and not the, uh, outline view, and now filter out some things.

49:18 Because the two data sources are not connected, the filter being applied to one just does not affect the other one at all, and I think this has opened up my mind to so many new things I wanna try out now. Um, but that's pretty much it. And, and if I, you know, just go through a few cleaning and formatting options, uh, I eventually come to a point where I've got something that looks like this.

49:38 Um, I feel like it's fairly simple to make something like this. The, the only thing that–

49:46 the, the only thing to consider is that it w- it, it can be time-consuming if you're using CBI Studio, if, and if you're plotting a lot of the values by, by default.

49:57 Now, Preethi, I'll be honest, I haven't been tracking time. Do you think we have a bit of time left to go over and, and talk about a few SVGs and Inkscape things?

50:08 Preethi Lodha: Yes, Rosh. We certainly have time for you.

50:11 Rosh Khan: Let's do it. Let's do it. So th-this, the part that I'm going to show you, um, I was not aware of this before, and-

50:18 Preethi Lodha: And I need to let you know that we did get a chuckle for your fairly simple You used such a word. I was like, "What is he talking about?" But…

50:30 Rosh Khan: It, it is, it is simple. Um,

50:35 yeah.

50:36 Th-this part that I'm gonna show you, uh, is something that I was intr- introduced to after I made this. I showed it to a colleague, and the colleague was like, "Hey, why don't you do this? This is a lot simpler." Um, so

50:49 the, the, the idea or the theory here is if I could do this by plotting those points on my screen, what if I can find a way to get any sort of image, automatically create those points, and feed those points through some sort of application or machine that gets those created for me?

51:10 Uh, and, and this is where Inkscape came in. So I have got a simple image here.

51:23 Don't know if you recognize this logo or not, um, but it's beautiful. Uh, it's got a few different elements or crosses, uh, that are joined together.

51:32 Um, I'm going to open up a tool called Inkscape.

51:36 Now, this tool, in my opinion, it is, is another Illustrator, um, software, except it's free. So you can, you can use that, or if you've got any sort of software, whether on your desktop or online, that lets you take an image and convert it into an SVG, this method would work. So I think I've made one already perhaps. Let's open this one.

52:04 So that's that same image that I had before. Um, I have just gone into, um, Inkscape. I pasted an image, clicked a few buttons, which just included, uh, tracing a bitmap. Maybe I can do this right now.

52:22 Um, if I drag this logo on, press Okay.

52:28 I've got a zoomed out image. Let me shrink it down, and let me drag it across.

52:35 Go to Path, hit Trace.

52:38 On the right, I am now converting an image into an SVG, and I can select the threshold of what I want to pass through. So I hit Apply on this, and the final thing I need to do is just break this one image into the smaller crosses. And now I've got these individual crosses that I can freely move around. Um, if you save that as an a– SVG and open that up as a text file, you essentially have a bunch of coordinates and a sequence and a pattern that, that you can follow for each, um, each image.

53:17 Uh, and it's a matter of getting these patterns to be recognized by some sort of software. Now, you can use Python here. You can use Alteryx here. There is a, uh, free online version, um, called this, which you can use, uh, or even just give it to ChatGPT. So I, I gave it to ChatGPT. I asked it to convert this XML into an XY path ID and a sequence or shape ID column.

53:47 It gave me a spreadsheet which looked very similar to what I was showing you before, which has an XY sequence being followed, uh, and a shape ID.

53:58 And if I open up Tableau again, get those columns down again. So X goes here, Y goes on rows, shape ID on detail, and I need to get the sequence on path, convert it into dimension.

54:18 And within sort of minutes, I've, I've got, uh, something that I had as an image converted into an SVG, um- Got it into an XML, got it into XCSV, and now it's on Tableau for me to play around with. And these can interact like normal custom polygons if you want to go with it. So you can see that changing.

54:40 Uh, this might be a bit to learn if, if you've never seen it before. Uh, don't worry, I've got resources that I'll share at the end, um, that should hopefully help you out with it.

54:49 But, but for me personally, it's, it's opened up a whole new world to now seeing how far I can go with it, see how far I can take images, SVGs, and, and do polygon visualization in, uh, in Tableau.

55:03 Now I've been, I've been going for a while.

55:05 I think I'm gonna stop. I'm gonna get a sip of water.

55:08 Um, does anyone have any questions?

55:12 Preethi Lodha: Yeah, no, thank you, Rosh. And, uh, just so you know, uh, you should read the chat, but while I hear if anybody has any questions, please drop them in the QA or in the chat. I'm happy to take it.

55:25 Everybody has a mind blown with the Inkscape thing that you put together, and I love that Michelle just dropped "dude" in the chat.

55:35 That is all you need to know for now.

55:38 Um, so while I have you here, uh, my question to you is how much time did it take to you build that viz? Because as you said, you did not probably… You just went in with the data and you started playing with it, right?

55:53 Rosh Khan: Yeah.

55:54 Preethi Lodha: Uh, what does the process look like in that case?

55:58 Rosh Khan: Sometimes I plan and sometimes I don't. Um, the days I plan, I do see myself, um, just taking less time to make something.

56:08 Preethi Lodha: Yeah.

56:08 Rosh Khan: But other times I just don't have the luxury to plan. I, I don't have dedicated time, you know, outside of work hours to just think and get a lot of stuff together, wait for it. Um, and I just like to dig into Tableau and start playing, playing around with it. Um, I'm not sure if I can give you a right estimate. Overall, it took me a month and a half, but this was a m- a month and a half on top of my job, so this was purely either at nighttime or in the weekend.

56:35 Um, this is my second Viz of the Day, which I can say is around a month and a half. My, uh, first Viz of the Day, um, I did it over two days over a weekend. Um-

56:47 Preethi Lodha: Yeah

56:47 Rosh Khan: … so quite, quite different.

56:50 Preethi Lodha: Yeah.

56:51 Rosh Khan: In both.

56:51 Preethi Lodha: What keeps you inspired, uh, then in that case? Like where are you coming up with these ideas, uh, of, uh, wanting to visualize the data?

57:00 Rosh Khan: I'd love to credit myself for this idea, but it honestly goes to my friend who was making fun of me for doing all these Tableau and then LinkedIn things. Um, I just wanted to prove him wrong. Um, the, the ideas, um, a lot of it…

57:14 Well, what I'm trying to do more recently now is wait until a, a good opportunity arises to solve an actual problem that I feel like exists, um, whether that's at work or whether that's outside of work.

57:29 Um, and I think that's where when there's something that urgently or, or has a desire to be solved, I think you channel a lot of energy and passion into it.

57:39 Um, an example I can think of is, uh, a colleague of mine had made… had, had taken, uh, data from, um, Octopus Energy, which is a, a bill, is an energy supplier.

57:51 Preethi Lodha: Yeah.

57:51 Rosh Khan: Sorry, an energy supplier in the UK.

57:53 Is it across other continents?

57:57 I don't know. Okay.

57:58 Um, and, uh, he wanted to know how much energy costed at each hour of the day for him to run certain appliances. So he called an API from Octopus Energy, um, cleaned the data, put it into a dashboard, and had a tablet that he put on his kitchen wall where his whole family can now see how much it's costing them to run certain appliances every hour.

58:22 Um, and I thought that was-

58:24 Preethi Lodha: There you go

58:24 Rosh Khan: … that was so cool.

58:26 Preethi Lodha: Yeah. No, it is always fun when people, uh, productionalize or visualize their needs and convert it into something that people can keep track of. Uh, and as Lisa said, Spike can be a very good motivator, uh, in case of your friend, uh, giving you a hard time and-

58:43 Rosh Khan: Yeah

58:43 Preethi Lodha: … asking you to visualize things. But having said that, thank you, Rosh. Uh, learned a lot of stuff. Uh, didn't realize there existed a CBI Studio all together where people could go and play, and I think it is an initial foray into the system. It is a good place to start with if you are trying to map certain things and bring that data into Tableau, so.

59:03 Rosh Khan: Absolutely, yeah.

59:04 Preethi Lodha: Yeah. Really appreciate it. Thank you.

59:07 Rosh Khan: Oh, thank you.

59:08 Preethi Lodha: Um-

59:08 Eric Howard: Great tools to go try.

59:12 Preethi Lodha: Okay, Eric.

59:13 Eric Howard: All right. Well, let's do some swag.

59:18 So we've got, um, a $50 gift certificate to give away, so, um, let's spin the wheel and see who our lucky winner is.

59:29 My favorite name on the board is Iris Son. Ah, that's… Sorry, Iris, but Jim Chin, also a winner.

59:37 I'm gonna assume that this is not the, uh, Oscar-winning rock climbing, uh, Jimmy Chin, but, uh, look forward to, uh, contacting you and getting you your gift card for anything from the Tableau store. So, uh, Jim, I'll DM you here in a bit or, uh, email tableaub public.TUG@Gmail.com, and we will get you set up with your gift certificate.

1:00:02 All right, uh, that's it for me. And back to Ollie and Rob.

1:00:09 Rob Taylor: Thank you very much, Eric. That was, uh, brilliant, Rosh. Thank you very much. Um, I was a former… I was Tableau Next at the time, a DataFam Rising Star, so it's really good to be part of this and showing the new talent coming through. There's some fantastic people out there. Um, I'm really pleased that Ollie and Rosh joined us. They've got two great…

1:00:25 well, two great portfolios. Um, but I'm- Lucky to introduce, uh, Ollie Ross-Russell, who is also a data analytics consultant at The Information Lab. Um, he did a degree in mathematics and statistics at Newcastle, um, and then went on to do, um, some work abroad, um, with a technology company, helping them solve their operational problems and things like that.

1:00:47 As we said, he's been recognized in the 2026 Tableau Data's Fun Rising Stars. He's got, uh, a Viz of the Day and, uh, the golf club, uh, overview dashboard he's gonna show us is brilliant, but I definitely recommend checking out the rest of his portfolio. There's some really cool bits of work on there. He was also recently nominated, uh, at Tableau Conference for three of the, uh, Vizzy Awards, so that's, that's a huge achievement in such a short amount of time.

1:01:13 Um, builds a lot of cool sports vizzes, um, and outside of work, he's obviously a massive sports enthusiastic- enthusiast, regularly plays golf, and, uh, supports Fulham Football Club, for all those football fans out there. So thank you very much for joining us, Ollie, um, and look forward to seeing what you've built. I've had a sneak peek, and I think we're getting a, a live demo as well, so yeah, very exciting.

1:01:36 Ollie Ross Russell: We are indeed. Thank you, Rob, for that introduction. I'm very glad you shouted out Fulham. I didn't ask for that. Uh, got Chelsea on Monday, so that should be, should be a fun one.

1:01:47 Uh, great. I'm gonna share my screen just in a second, uh, but thanks a lot for the intro, Rob. Uh, like Rob just told you, I'm Ollie. I'm a data analytics consultant here at The Information Lab as well. Uh, Ross is literally right next door to me.

1:02:02 Uh, and today, I'm gonna be taking you through my golf club overview dashboard, uh, on Tableau Public, which, like Rob says, I was lucky enough to get a Viz of the Day for.

1:02:13 I'll then be taking you through some of the inspiration behind the dashboard, uh, some of the data setup as well, and then we're gonna be hopping into Tableau for a scary live demo, which hopefully goes okay. Uh, this time making a overview dashboard for a tennis club rather than a golf club.

1:02:32 Great. So I hope you can all see that.

1:02:34 Uh, this is the Hidden River Golf Club, so this is my golf club overview dashboard.

1:02:40 On the left-hand side, this is the, uh, navigation pane. So I have my overview. I then have a course and maintenance view, a pro shop view, and also some settings down the bottom.

1:02:52 We'll get that… get into that in a little bit. Uh, but let's start with the overview. So yeah, this is a golf club. I'm imagining it as if I'm a manager of the golf club, and I wanna see kind of what's going on in the day on my course. So I don't know if we've got any golf, uh, players or fans out here today.

1:03:11 Uh, but we'll start off with the clock.

1:03:14 So as you can see, this is, well, it's a few minutes late, but when I last refreshed it, it was a live clock there that we've built in Tableau.

1:03:22 I then have a couple of KPIs telling me how many rounds have been played today and how many remaining tee times there are. And then I have the tee time sheet. So this is filtered down to today, the twentieth of August, and you can see all of the different available tee times that I had.

1:03:38 Where they're grayed out, that's obviously, uh, because the time has passed, so the whole idea of this dashboard is that it's almost, uh, well, it is, it's live in Tableau Public, which, um, I thought was really cool.

1:03:52 And so, yeah, we've got the grayed out ones that have already passed. Then we have some available tee times, and the booked tee times in orange, where you can see we have, um, some different names, ages, and handicaps on the tooltips there.

1:04:05 Then on the right-hand side, we have our course. So this is an 18-hole course I completely imagined, and I did some design in Figma, which was on- one of my favorite parts of building the dashboard. But here you can see all the 18 holes, the different pars, and the yardages there.

1:04:21 And then we have a little course status indicator on the bottom right-hand side. So these are all little shapes, so you can hover over to see the name of the hole, uh, the par, and also the maintenance status. So you might have noticed some of these are orange. I've imagined that these holes are under repair on my golf course.

1:04:40 Now, if I go to the course and maintenance view, we can see a little bit more about the course. Uh, so I've got an even more intricate Figma design of my golf course. Uh, that's how much fun I had, uh, kind of doing the design behind it, but this is showing you pretty much the same thing, all of the different holes, their names, and the maintenance status on them.

1:05:00 We then have our staff rotor for the, um, greenskeepers working at the golf course. So I can either view, uh, the rotor for today or tomorrow, and there I can see the different staff members that are working, the different tasks, and the different holes as well.

1:05:15 Uh, this part is actually my friend who's a greenskeeper, so I thought I'd have to put him in there.

1:05:21 And then we also have current maintenance, so these holes that are highlighted in orange, I've said, uh, the reason why they're currently under maintenance there.

1:05:32 Our third view is the pro shop view, so this is looking at sales, profit, and orders really. If you've seen, I'm sure you have all seen, uh, sa- um, super store dashboards in Tableau Public, so this takes inspiration from those dashboards, but then, uh, of course, in the view of a golf club. So as you can see, my pro shop is doing tremendously well.

1:05:54 I've done, uh, over a million pounds of sales in the last 12 months, which is terrific.

1:06:00 Uh, so yeah, we have our KPI kind of style cards on the left-hand side. You can of course, uh, hover over for different tooltips there.

1:06:07 And then we have a category breakdown on the right. So, uh, we can view this by sales, profit, or orders. I'll go for profit here.

1:06:16 Then we have our five different categories of things that we're selling in our shop, and if we select one of the categories, we can then view the sales performance down below. So if I want clubs here, I can see, uh, with the, with this gauge chart that, um, clubs were made up 61% of sales in the last 12 months, and iron sets were our bestseller, although you can see they were down about 20% from the 12 months prior to that.

1:06:44 Then lastly, I'm just gonna quickly show you, I've got some date and time settings in here. Uh, so because the overview is kind of live and it's using the, uh, time from my laptop, which is of course in the UK in London, I thought I should put in some, uh, interactivity for if you're viewing this from another country.

1:07:02 So here you can select different time zones, or you can man- manually adjust the time here, and also selecting today's date. So a bit like Rosh's calendar, I've got a calendar there too.

1:07:14 Uh, so I'll just quickly show you if we have anyone live from Brazil, uh, hopefully it's two o'clock in the afternoon there.

1:07:22 And, oh, live demo.

1:07:29 If I selected that, uh, let's just try that one more time.

1:07:36 That should update our tee times, um, so that…

1:07:40 There we go. Uh, so it's now two o'clock in the afternoon, and we can see we have a few more tee times available, uh, this afternoon.

1:07:48 So that's the dashboard.

1:07:50 Um, I'm going to now jump into my slides and s- talk to you about some of the inspiration behind the dashboard.

1:07:57 So first off, uh, sports vizs on Tableau Public. I think any sports fan that's been on Tableau Public has spent hours looking through, um, the thousands of sports visualizations that are there, and there are a load of really, really good ones. I've picked out three here that are, I guess, centered to golf. So we have, uh, some, uh, some dashboards based on, uh, real golf tournaments, like the Masters.

1:08:23 We then have Superstore-style dashboards. So this dashboard here, I really took inspiration from, uh, to create my pro shop view. That dashboard was by Patrick McGuire.

1:08:34 And then we also have this TPC Sawgrass course view. Uh, so this is a more design-orientated dashboard, which is what I was looking at when I was designing my course, uh, in Figma.

1:08:46 Then next up, genuine golf booking pages. Uh, I play a lot of golf myself, so I'm always, uh, trawling through Golf Now and different booking sites where you see, uh, this kind of style.

1:08:58 Uh, all the available tee times at different prices, et cetera. That's kind of what I wanted to create, uh, in Tableau as if, like I said, as if I was a, a manager at a golf course.

1:09:09 Then finally, I guess, uh, all live-looking dashboards and, um, especially clocks in Tableau. I was fascinated by, uh, seeing clocks in Tableau Public which were showing the right time.

1:09:21 So, uh, this dashboard you can see here, and the associated blog was by, uh, Gwilym Lockwood, and I'm gonna take you through, um, how to actually create those, um, clocks in Tableau. But first up, I'm just gonna go through some of the data behind the dashboard.

1:09:39 So I had four different data sources really, uh, comprised of, uh, sheets in Excel, and ChatGPT did a lot of the help here. So I'll take you through them one by one.

1:09:49 First up, we have the clock.

1:09:51 So you might be surprised at how simple this really is, uh, but this is all the data we need to bring into Tableau. So just two columns, time unit, where we have hours and minutes, and then path ID, which is either zero or one.

1:10:05 Obviously, this is gonna need some calculations, so I think there's seven calculated fields, uh, that I'm gonna take you through later, and a little bit of trigonometry there, uh, to get your clock in Tableau.

1:10:18 Then next up, we have the members and the tee times data source.

1:10:22 So I started by creating a, a member table here. So I had something like a hundred and twenty different members at my golf club.

1:10:31 Uh, just giving you a screenshot here of some of them. We have their names, their membership types, then also their join dates and their handicaps.

1:10:40 So I generously gave myself a zero handicap. I'm not actually that good.

1:10:44 Uh, then on the right-hand side we have our tee times. So this is where I got ChatGPT to essentially give me all the available tee times for every day from the start of twenty twenty-five till the end of twenty twenty-eight, I think.

1:10:59 So I better, uh, update the dashboard at the end of twenty twenty-eight, or it'll, it'll break if anyone's still looking at it then.

1:11:07 And then on the right-hand side there, you can see our member IDs. So that's just randomly assigned one of the member IDs from our base table on the left, uh, to these different tee times.

1:11:19 Related them, of course, in Tableau on member ID.

1:11:22 So if I go and look at any of these tee times on the right, I can see the associated member and some of their details as well.

1:11:30 Next up, we have the course and maintenance view. I'll quickly go through this. It's pretty similar to the last one really. Uh, so on the left-hand side we have the course that I created. As you can see, eighteen holes.

1:11:41 Uh, gave a, a name to all of the different holes as well.

1:11:44 Then I just made up the pars, yardages. This is where I inputted my maintenance status as well. Then we have stuff like temporary greens and temporary tees alongside the maintenance.

1:11:56 Then on the right-hand side, similar to the tee times really, this is our, uh, staff rota for the maintenance. So for each day, we had whichever staff were working, then the different tasks they were doing, and then randomly assigned them a hole that they'd be working on for the day, and related that on hole number there to join the two of them together.

1:12:16 Then finally, we have our pro shop view.

1:12:19 So to create this, I really simply just gave ChatGPT a little bit of, um, Superstore and said, "Can you change the categories and the products to make it a bit more specific for a golf shop?" So you're more likely to find stuff like clubs, apparel, and accessories in a golf shop than your, uh, like tables or whatever's in Superstore. So I changed that there, have the different products there.

1:12:45 Really simple stuff to make my KPIs.

1:12:49 So let's jump into Tableau now and remake the dashboard, but we're gonna slim it down a little bit, and we're also gonna do it for a tennis club, hopefully creating three different sheets to make something that looks a little bit like this.

1:13:03 First up, though, I'm just gonna quickly take you through the data behind the tennis club.

1:13:08 So, uh, we've got three different sheets here. We have clock, members, and court booking. So clock is exactly the same as what I used for the golf club dashboard. There you can see we have time unit and path ID.

1:13:23 Then we once again have our members table, so a hundred and twenty different members of our tennis club here, different membership types, and their join dates.

1:13:32 Then finally, we have our court booking. So this is where it dif-differs a little bit from our, uh, golf data because, uh, when you're booking for golf, there's usually tee times about every ten minutes. That wouldn't be reasonable for a tennis club, so I've given a time slot every hour, but I've also included four different courts at our, um, tennis club.

1:13:52 So you can see we've got now court ID as well.

1:13:55 So that's all we need. So we can now hop into Tableau.

1:13:59 And so just to take you through the two data sources here, we have the clock and then the court bookings, which was just a relationship between, uh, those two tables that I showed you there, court bookings and members.

1:14:14 So let's start with clock.

1:14:15 Now, for the clock, the main function we're gonna want to use, which you may have seen before in Tableau, is Now. As you can see, when I put Now into rows, we are returned with the current date and the current time. That's for me here in the UK, so you can see it matches, uh, the bottom right there. But to make our clock, we don't actually need that whole thing.

1:14:36 We don't need the, the dates, and we don't need the seconds. So we're gonna make a couple of calculations just to extract what we need.

1:14:44 The first one is hours.

1:14:46 All we want is the hour from now, so I'm gonna use the date park function.

1:14:51 And I want to see the hour from now.

1:14:58 Just gonna quickly check that.

1:15:01 Eighteen, perfect, six PM.

1:15:05 And we're gonna do a very similar thing with minutes.

1:15:08 We want the date park looking for the minute of now.

1:15:16 Great.

1:15:17 So we'll check our minutes as well, and that seems to be working. But you might… Well, you of course know that, um, on a clock, the hour hand doesn't point at the hour for the whole hour. So, for example, if it's four thirty, it's not gonna point at four for the whole hour. It's gonna creep from four to five. So for that reason, we want to create another calculator field called exact hours.

1:15:43 And what y- what this is gonna do, I'll just zoom in a little bit on these notes, is it's gonna add the fraction of the current hour that has passed.

1:15:51 So we're gonna look at hours, and then what we want to look at is our minutes divided by sixty. So that's that fraction of the hour that has passed. So if it's half past, half past four, it's gonna give four plus thirty over sixty, four and a half for our exact hours.

1:16:10 So now we want to relate these back to our data, uh, via time unit, and what that's gonna do is give us one field for the values that we want to plot.

1:16:20 So for this, I am going to say if our time unit from our data is equal to hours,

1:16:30 then we want to see the exact hour.

1:16:38 Um, else, I'm just gonna write this out in full just to make it super clear.

1:16:45 If we're looking at minutes,

1:16:49 then we want our minutes.

1:16:55 Fantastic. So that's combined the exact hour that we need and the minutes that we need into one field, and what we can get from that is the angle.

1:17:06 So here we want to convert the number that we have, the time value, into an angle around the c-clock face.

1:17:13 So hours, of course, there's twelve different positions around the clock face, and minutes there are sixty. Uh, so we're gonna convert these into degrees here.

1:17:22 So I'm gonna say if the time unit

1:17:27 is hours again,

1:17:32 then we want the time for plotting that we just calculated, and I want to divide that by twelve for the possible slots of hour.

1:17:42 And I'm gonna times that by three sixty to give us our total around the circle.

1:17:53 And do a very similar thing here once again for minutes.

1:18:01 We wanna grab our time for plotting, this time dividing it by sixty,

1:18:08 and once again timesing it by three sixty.

1:18:12 Now, you might have seen that, uh, final note that I put there.

1:18:16 And so when we looked at our hours earlier, we saw that they were in a twenty-four-hour clock, so we're seeing eighteen instead of six, uh, for the PM.

1:18:26 Now you might think that's gonna produce an angle, uh, above three sixty, but luckily for us, uh, a clock is circular, so it repeats. So eighteen is gonna produce five-five forty, which is the exact same position as one eighty. Um, so we actually don't need to worry about that, luckily.

1:18:47 So there we have our angles.

1:18:49 I'm gonna quickly jump back to the slides here.

1:18:52 Because we unfortunately need to go back to school and do a little bit of trigonometry. So we have our theta here. This is the angle we just calculated. Now, a little bit of trigonometry will tell you that the X coordinate that we need to plot is going to be ca-calculated using sine theta, and the Y value is gonna be calculated using cos theta. Now, the only thing we need to remember here is that, uh, Tableau natively uses radians instead of degrees, and as I've just calculated our angles in degrees, we're gonna need to, um…

1:19:26 we're gonna need to convert them to radians.

1:19:29 So here are X and Y coordinates.

1:19:33 I won't bore you with writing these out again.

1:19:36 Um, but what these are doing is converting them into an X coordinate and then also relating them back to the path ID that we saw earlier.

1:19:43 So what path ID does is it's controlling where the start and the end points of each hand are.

1:19:49 So when path ID is one, that's where we're gonna want to go to the end of our hour hand and the end of our minute hand.

1:19:55 So this is the calculation we have here. When it's hours, it's sine of the angle we just calculated.

1:20:03 That's converted to radians.

1:20:05 Then when it's minutes, it's the same exact… same equ-equation, but we've times it by one point six there. That's just because we want our minute hand to be longer than our hour hand as it is on a clock.

1:20:17 Then else zero, that's for when path ID is zero. We're gonna go back to the center which is zero zero.

1:20:25 For Y, it's the exact same thing there, but instead of sine, we've used cos, just to nod back to our trigonometry, and that's it. So seven different calculated fields, and you are ready to build a live clock in Tableau. So if I drag X to our columns and Y to our rows, we get given one point there. So what we need to do is drag time unit into detail.

1:20:50 That's gonna give us two different points. So that's for our hours and our minutes, and if I change this to line, it's gonna join them up directly, but that's where our path ID comes in, and that's gonna take us back to zero zero.

1:21:04 So we're getting there, but what we need to do now is edit our axes, and I'm gonna fix these to minus two up to two on the Y-axis

1:21:16 and also

1:21:19 minus two to two on the X-axis.

1:21:26 And now we're looking a little bit more like a clock, which to me looks like it's pointing pretty near six twenty-four, which is great.

1:21:33 So I'm gonna hide our, our headers here, and the last thing I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna dual axis this Y.

1:21:42 Remember to synchronize my axes, and then I'm gonna change this one into a circle, just to make it look a little nicer.

1:21:51 Let's also make it all a bit bigger.

1:21:55 Why don't we change the color there?

1:21:58 Great.

1:21:59 So I'm gonna hide the headers there, and that really is it. That's our clock built. Uh, the only thing that, of course, it needs is some numbers behind it, so you can actually tell the time. Uh, but we'll come to that once all these sheets are put into our dashboard at the end.

1:22:13 So next up, we're looking at the time sheet. So what we need here is all the different court bookings for the current day.

1:22:20 So the first port of call here is to filter to just the current day.

1:22:26 First, I'm gonna change our data source to look at our court bookings, and I have a field here ready to write in. So what we need to do is filter the date to just today. So this is the date within our data, and we're just gonna use the today function in Tableau.

1:22:44 So this is similar to the now function that we've been using, but today is gonna give you just today's date.

1:22:50 So it's gonna give us a simple Boolean that we can drag to filters and click true. Now, anything that we drag in from now is going to be…

1:23:00 That's already… It already knows that I want to do a shape. I'll just get rid of that text for now.

1:23:04 Everything that we drag in now is going to be filtered down to today.

1:23:08 So let's check that. Let's drag date to our columns here, and hopefully we see the twentieth of August. That's great.

1:23:15 Let's make that a little bit bigger.

1:23:22 Fantastic. Now, of course, we now have different courts at our club, so I wanna drag them onto columns as well.

1:23:29 So we should see the four different courts there.

1:23:32 Once again, I'm just gonna format that to make that look a little bit nicer.

1:23:38 Great, and finally, into our rows, we want to bring in all the different time slots for our tennis club.

1:23:45 And this is looking a little bit more like it. So now we can see that from six AM until ten at night, we have all these different available slots for our tennis club.

1:23:55 This is where I'm gonna change back to a shape, and I've already preloaded a little, uh, button in there, which I think works really well for the kind of booking system style, uh, dashboard, and I wanna control drag time into label, and now we can hide that header, and that's looking good.

1:24:15 That's all the available, uh, court bookings for today, the twentieth of August, on all the four different courts. But now, what I really want to do is color these according to whether the time's already passed or whether someone else has already booked them.

1:24:30 So let's start with the time already passing.

1:24:34 What we need to do here is compare the booking slot hour with the current hour using now.

1:24:39 So we're gonna go back to our datepart function,

1:24:43 grabbing the hour from the time slot.

1:24:47 Oh.

1:24:51 And we're gonna say, "Is that less than or equal to-"

1:24:57 The current hour that it is now.

1:25:06 Once again, that's another Boolean, so time passed. Let's drag that onto color, check if that's working. Great, so we can see that time passed is true. That's for all of the times before 6:00 o'clock, and then any of them in the future, we've got false.

1:25:21 I'm gonna drag that off color for now 'cause we're gonna move on to our second one, which is booking status, which is really simple. We want to know whether the court at that time has been booked.

1:25:31 So in our member ID column, if there's no member ID, that's gonna mean the court's available. If there is a member ID present, that means it's booked. So here I'm going to say, if member ID is null,

1:25:46 then available.

1:25:51 Else, I'm gonna call it booked.

1:25:59 Let's drag that booking status onto color,

1:26:03 and there we can see that looks about right to me. About seventy or eighty percent of our, uh, courts are booked today.

1:26:10 I'm gonna take this off, and you might now be wondering, uh, why I've colored them, um, done those two Boolean fields separately there, and why I've not just done a long calculation, uh, to color exactly what I want to. I think this is quite a neat trick in Tableau. If I control, control and hold on the two Booleans there and drag them both onto color, then it's gonna give me the four different combinations of the two Booleans, which I can color by.

1:26:35 So if I now go to color, I can see, um, so the way I kind of decipher these labels is if you look at the edit colors at the top here. So first we have our time passed, then we have our booking status. So for our time passed, if any time passed is true, we know we want to gray them out. So I'm gonna do that now.

1:26:56 Then, uh, for any time slots in the future, if they're available, why don't we make them green?

1:27:03 And if they're already booked, let's make them purple.

1:27:07 And there we have it. That looks just like my one in the golf course, um, dashboard did, and I think that's ready to go into our dashboard at the end.

1:27:16 But I've got one more sheet, which is looking at court percentage indicators. So what I want to see here is the most popular courts on the day.

1:27:25 So once again here, we're gonna want to, uh, drag our filter date is today in 'cause we only wanna see today's courts.

1:27:33 Oh, sorry, I should also mention, I have done a little bit of, uh, scaffolding here. So column and row is just splitting these courts. So we've got court one here, court two here, court three here, court four there.

1:27:45 But like I said, we want to bring in date is today to filter down to today.

1:27:51 Say that's true.

1:27:53 And now let's change this to a bar chart. I want to see the total amount of bookings that are possible, so I'm just gonna use the count of court bookings there, which is auto-generated for me. And you can see that each court has seventeen potential bookings there.

1:28:08 We can bring booking status onto color, whi-which is a field we just created.

1:28:13 And there we can see for each court the number of, uh, number of available and the number of booked slots. So court two, for example, has eleven booked slots, and it has six available slots.

1:28:27 Now, I actually want to see the percentage here, so I'm gonna create a table calculation, and I want to see the percentage of total.

1:28:37 But as you see here, why are we only going up to fifty percent? We'd think there's something wrong with our compute, which indeed there is. We want to Compute Using cell, so that's looking at each court individually.

1:28:48 And there we should be able to see the percentage of bookings.

1:28:52 So I'm going to copy that over to label.

1:28:56 I also want to see my court on label.

1:28:59 I'm just gonna quickly edit this, so on court X, that percentage is booked.

1:29:10 Great. So that's what we need there for our indicators. Let's hide these headers, and let's change our colors to what they were before. So for booked, we had purple, and for the available slots, we had green.

1:29:24 That looks good to me. Uh, so we're very nearly there. Let's now go into our dashboard and hopefully our three sheets have

1:29:33 made us a nice-looking dashboard. So on the left-hand side, we have our booking sheet. This is showing us all of our available, uh, court bookings on the day. As you can see, I could do some work to tidy up the tooltips and introduce, uh, which members maybe, uh, booked some of these slots. Then in the middle, we have our clock, which is working.

1:29:52 I'm just gonna come out of here for now.

1:29:54 As you can s-see, it's now six thirty-three. So if we just go to our data, refresh our clock, fingers crossed that updates as it does.

1:30:04 And then finally, we have our court availability on the right-hand side. Um, I've overlaid a little tennis court, uh, image on top. So that's just a transparent PNG there just for an ex-extra bit of design. Um, but yeah, that's it really. Uh, that is three sheets, and it's really using the same ideas I had behind my, uh, golf overview dashboard.

1:30:30 And I think when you add this design part at the end, it's kind of what elevates it from a bunch of charts to, uh, like what seems like a live product, and I think that's kind of the inspiration behind my, uh, viz in the first place.

1:30:46 So thank you very much for having me, and if you have any questions, I'd be glad to take them.

1:30:53 Rob Taylor: That was, that was fantastic, Ollie. There's a lot of pressure doing a live demo, and you, you absolutely nailed that, so well done to start with.

1:31:00 Ollie Ross Russell: Thank you.

1:31:00 Rob Taylor: Um, and you highlight loads of great functions and, and tricks and tips you can use in, in Tableau that are native in there, the now, the date And, and things like that. So yeah, fantastic to see.

1:31:11 Um, not many questions. There's a lot of love in the chat. I'll let you read it afterwards, but, um, just a couple of questions from me. Obviously, you have gone through, I know about the data school and all the learning and things you do in that. Have you got any tips to people sort of starting out on their Tableau journey? Anything that you were taught that you'd, you'd give to people-

1:31:29 Ollie Ross Russell: Mm

1:31:29 Rob Taylor: … who are starting out?

1:31:31 Ollie Ross Russell: I think the main tip that I give to anyone when I meet them, maybe if they're coming to, like, a meet and greet at the Information Lab and they've never really used Tableau before, is just get into Tableau Public, uh, look at any viz that you like, and most of the time you can download it and see what they've done behind the scenes. And I know a lot of people say it, but when I started using Tableau and I was inspired by all these really, uh, amazing visualizations, anything that looks impossible, I would think, "Wow, how do you do that?" Um, so I'd download it, go into the worksheet, and sometimes you think you still don't understand.

1:32:07 But sometimes you can then find a blog, uh, which is kind of gonna help you progress from there and, yeah, get on that learning curve, I guess.

1:32:16 Rob Taylor: Yeah, definitely agree. I, I always download people's workbooks. And I'd also add to that, if, if you are looking at someone's and you don't fully understand it, I'd say reach out to them. Most, most… Pretty much everyone in the community is so welcoming and always-

1:32:28 Ollie Ross Russell: 100%

1:32:28 Rob Taylor: … happy to chat about their vizs they've built, especially if someone else is looking at it. We all love to show off what we've done.

1:32:33 Ollie Ross Russell: Yeah.

1:32:33 Rob Taylor: Um, the other thing I was… One I loved on your profile, you did a recreation of the Sportsball. Um, the guy who draws-

1:32:41 Ollie Ross Russell: Yeah

1:32:41 Rob Taylor: … the, um… He basically draws sports events, doesn't he? Draws them outline.

1:32:45 Ollie Ross Russell: Yeah.

1:32:45 Rob Taylor: Um, how much fun was that to build?

1:32:48 Ollie Ross Russell: Really… That was really, really good fun. I- I th- I saw the video on Instagram Reels, and I was just like, "That looks like a Tableau dashboard." I was like, "I have to make that." Um, so I then got into Figma, tried to, like… I even tried to rec- recreate, like, the grid background and the font that, like, looked a little bit sketchy on it.

1:33:08 Uh, posted that on LinkedIn. Uh, didn't really think much of it, and the guy @Sportsball even reached out saying, "Wow, this is amazing." Uh-

1:33:17 Rob Taylor: Amazing

1:33:17 Ollie Ross Russell: … so that was a really nice kind of full circle moment for me there. Um-

1:33:21 Rob Taylor: Sure. Yeah, nice

1:33:21 Ollie Ross Russell: … but yeah, no, that, that was a really good fun one. I think the problem I have with the dashboards is I love my sport so much that I need to do other ones. I want to do other ones.

1:33:32 Rob Taylor: Yeah.

1:33:32 Ollie Ross Russell: But then I'll see something like that and I'm like, "Okay, I've got to do that."

1:33:36 Rob Taylor: Yeah. There's nothing wrong with that. I- I, I mean, I'm the same. I do a lot of sports dashboards. Um, I just say to anyone, if you're vizzing about what you love, um, you're more likely to want to learn more and learn all different techniques to recreate these things. So-

1:33:48 Ollie Ross Russell: 100%

1:33:48 Rob Taylor: … there's definitely nothing wrong with having a passion on there. It definitely shines through in your work. And yeah, thank you for sharing it with us and coming along to the TUG.

1:33:56 Ollie Ross Russell: No, no problem. Thank you very much for having me.

1:33:58 Rob Taylor: You're welcome.

1:34:00 Back to you, Lisa.

1:34:03 Lisa Trescott: Yeah. Thank you all again so much. There was a lot of great content in these presentations, a lot of passion, some spite. This was a really, really good one. Uh, and thank you all so much. It's really easy to see why you are part of the Rising Stars cohort this year. It's some really amazing, amazing work you guys are putting out there.

1:34:24 Rob Taylor: Yeah.

1:34:25 Lisa Trescott: Okay. Our next meeting is one you don't want to miss. We've got not one, not two, but all three of the 2026 Iron Viz contestants. So Kevin We, Brian Moore, and Champion Ann Regler are gonna be here to go behind the scenes of the vizs that they built for us live in 20 minutes at TC. So you don't want to miss this one. It will be same time on September 17th.

1:34:53 Uh, and with that, thank you all again. Thank you to Adam, to Ollie Ross, and to Rosh for being here to present and for great conversations and for sharing so much. I think we all learned something uh, during this meeting and, and had a lot of fun. So thank you. We will see you all back here again on the 17th of September.

1:35:13 Take care, everyone.

1:35:14 Rob Taylor: Thank you. Bye.

1:35:16 Ollie Ross Russell: Thanks.