#QuantifiedSelf - I Am What I Listen To

 Hello, my name is Dave, and I'm a music addict.

In 2007, I started tracking the music I listened to through a website called Last.fm. Back then, I typically listened to music through iTunes. However, iTunes didn't provide a good historic view of all the songs I've listened to. My eclectic, offbeat taste in music combined with my inner data nerd made Last.fm a great resource to me. Over the years, I've used Last.fm to track much of the music I've listened to through my iTunes desktop application, my iPod, and now through my Spotify desktop application. The only downside is that Last.fm doesn't track music I listen to on my iPhone's Spotify app, which I tend to use quite a bit.

The next step, after tracking and storing the data, is to visualize it. And what better time to create a music data viz than #QuantifiedSelf month?! I took my data, flowed it through Tableau and came up with a visualization that encourages the exploration of my music listening habits.

A few interesting insights to point out from the 1 year look-back period shown above:

• I typically have project huddles during the morning and try to reserve afternoons for development, which can be clearly seen in the "typical week, in songs played" heat map
• My peak time of day to listen to music is around 3pm on Wednesday, and when clicking on this time I see I listen to a lot of punk rock, which typically has shorter song lengths, thus the higher song play count at that time
• You can see I typically don't start listening to music until 9am, but on 3/28 I had some early morning work to do where I listened to a lot of Math Rock, a genre of asymmetric time signatures and complex rhythms, to stimulate my brain and keep me going early in the morning.
• If you switch over to the "mood" filter, you can see I'm pretty well balanced between upbeat and relaxed music and that I've been listening to a lot more "chill" music recently. If you check out some of the chillwave bands I've been listening to, you'll see their music is perfect for warm weather - I'm ready for Summer!

Subscribe!

A few days ago, I was asked to elaborate on the capabilities and limitations of the subscription function within Tableau Server. Sure, Tableau's Online Help website has information on this subject, but I couldn't quite find everything I thought an end user would be interested in knowing in one happy place.

Some background information is that part of my job is to develop Tableau Dashboards, to do a little Server admin work, and to also demo any and all things Tableau-related. If you do any or all of the aforementioned, I think we can agree that it's important to utilize the full strength of Tableau desktop and server. But, in reality, a lot of Tableau's nifty features can get lost in a typical project. This is why I think it's important to package up as many of the cool/relevant features I can into the dashboard design itself, then demo all the extra cool "stuff" (i.e. subscriptions) the end user can do in order to create a greater sense of empowerment over the data and increase usage to drive better insights.

With that being said, this post is for you if you're:

• developing a Tableau dashboard, publishing it to Server and would like your audience to receive your dashboard for updates
• accessing Server to check out a few dashboards and would like to receive one or more on a regular basis
• simply interested in a new (and super exciting) way to demo the subscription function of Tableau Server

Subscriptions allow the user to schedule an email to hit his/her inbox with an updated snapshot view of a dashboard, or even all dashboards in a workbook, that he/she would like to see on a regular basis without having to log into Tableau Server.

The subscription functionality was introduced as a new feature to Tableau Server during its v8.0 release around Q2 2013. No, this wasn't a groundbreaking innovation by Tableau, rather, a rapidly growing Tableau very wisely jumped on the subscription bandwagon. Tableau saw a large potential increase in users of Tableau Server, its means of spreading data to the masses. With many of these end users already comfortable with traditional BI tools scheduling canned reports to their respective inbox, Tableau added the subscription function to stay relevant and competitive with the plethora of BI tools already performing this task.

In an ideal world, all users log into Server to interact with the dashboards for rapid-fire insights. However, we all know a manager or two that refuses to use any technology other than their email and smart phone. This is where Tableau subscriptions come in handy; they help familiarize the typical "hands-off" user with the dashboard. And once that person starts bringing printouts of the dashboard to meetings and plugging it into PowerPoint presentations, it won't be long before the adoption curve has them logged into Server and interacting with the data - maybe even with their iPad!

Hopefully by now I've made my point as to why subscriptions can be a good thing and you now want to see a demo. Well, here's how a typical user would go about interacting with Tableau's subscription function...

Below is our "typical" dashboard view as it would appear on Server. Nothing fancy here, just a summary dashboard of some mocked up campaign performance data. Let's pretend the data presented in this dashboard is actually a live connection to a database that updates everyday at noon. We can already see some interesting data here, with performance trends and benchmarking, a top 10 chart, and a drill down chart that updates through dashboard actions. Anyone interested in viewing this information would be forced to log into our Server, find this view, and refresh it with the latest data.

At the top right, a (very small) mail icon appears next to the download link. What's interesting is that little mail icon is packed with power. Let's click on the mail icon and walk through the pop up window below... and feel free to click on the image to get a bigger view.

Step 1. Click to open subscription options.

Step 2. Check the destination email. We are able to change this. (I describe how in the "manage my subscriptions" section below)

Step 3. Edit the email subject to be something relevant. ("Overall Summary" works for me)

Step 4. Select the schedule for this dashboard to be sent. Options are controlled by the Tableau Administrator and can be customized.

Step 5. Select the content to be emailed - "This Sheet" sends only the sheet/tab/dashboard - "Sheets in Workbook" sends all dashboards within the workbook being viewed.

Voilà! I have just successfully subscribed to the "Overall Summary" dashboard, with it scheduled to hit my email inbox everyday at 2:30pm. Interested in seeing what this might look like in a Microsoft Outlook inbox? Look no further...

A perfect dashboard view sitting in my inbox! Here, the email was sent by our default mail distributor we set up for our Tableau Server, called the BI Applications Team. The email was sent promptly to my inbox by 2:31pm, only 1 minute after the schedule should have began to run. If I click anywhere on the dashboard, it will bring me to the dashboard on Server, so I'd like to remind you now that this is a static, non-interactive view of the data. The benefit here is that it could be refreshed with live data if that's how the data connection is set up.

If there are tons of subscriptions the Server has to process during the same time, the Tableau Administrator is able to prioritize certain subscriptions over others to ensure key dashboards are hitting users' inboxes as soon as possible. Please work with your Admin if this is the case.

Now, let's scroll down to the bottom of the email and take a look...

What you should see is a link to "Manage my subscription settings." This comes in handy especially when you want to unsubscribe from the current dashboard, or change your subscription settings. Here's a look at what pops up on Tableau Server after you click the link and log in...

I've added in a red box to help highlight the area of focus.

• I am free to edit the Subject of the email to be something more relevant to me.
• I am also able to change the schedule of the email to a new option, for example I could change it to be weekly on Mondays at 9am. If I don't see an ideal option available, I can contact the Tableau Server administrator and see if he/she can include a better schedule for my dashboard.
• I am also able to unsubscribe from my current subscription. If I click the unsubscribe button and then hit "Update," the subscription should disappear.

Oh, and one last thing, I can also update the email my subscription is delivered to in the "Change Email" section at the top of the page.

If I go back to the dashboard on Server, I'm free to create a custom view of the dashboard by clicking the filters that are most relevant to me, then saving the view to My Custom Views. For example, I clicked the "Circulation" option in the "Select a Metric to Analyze" filter and created the "Circulation" custom view below, then went through the subscription process for that view to have it hit my inbox instead of the standard view (which was originally "Demand").

Some points to call out with Tableau's subscription functionality are:

• If there is a date filter set on the dashboard when it is published to Server, Tableau will not update the end date of that filter to reflect the current date. The only way I know how to handle this is to have someone edit the date in Tableau Desktop, then re-publish that dashboard to Server. I'd really like to see Tableau add an automatic end-date update function in the future.
• If there are hidden tabs in a dashboard when it is published to Server, those tabs will not appear in the email subscription.
• If there is a dashboard with many filter options, and the end user would like to see each of those filters, he/she would need to filter to each option and set a new subscription to his/her inbox.
• Tableau does not support a wide variety of export options at the moment. Other tools allow for Excel, PDF, PowerPoint, etc. export options. Tableau only sends a PNG image hyper-linked to the dashboard view on Server.

If you have any other points I haven't called out here, please feel free to comment and I'll add it to the list. Thanks for reading!