Howdy, everyone! Here are all the links you may or may not need for the workshop on Friday:

First, download Tableau Public, if you haven’t already:

https://www.tableau.com/public/download

Second, download the county rankings data, from here:

http://www.countyhealthrankings.org/rankings/data

We want the top file – the 2015 county rankings in XLS format (Excel format).

http://www.countyhealthrankings.org/sites/default/files/2015CountyHealthRankingsNationalData.xls

Also, I have two Tableau visualizations that I would like to use for some demonstrations and further explanations of both how I use Tableau, and how I conduct data investigations. During the workshop, I’ll show how to download these workbooks straight into Tableau, and then make them your own:

https://public.tableau.com/views/CountryTrendsData2015/CountryTrendsData?:embed=y&:showTabs=y&:display_count=yes

https://public.tableau.com/views/EPADMRPollutants_0/EPADMRPollutants?:embed=y&:showTabs=y&:display_count=yes

I’ll be sure and explain plenty more during the workshop including some of the other tools I use – like OpenRefine, and Workspace Macro Pro. One word of warning: I work on a Windows platform, and many of the programs I use aren’t available for Macintosh. I poked around online and found some promising Macintosh macro programs, but I’m not aware of any substitutes for OpenRefine. It does appear that Tabula can work with the Macintosh (yes, Tabula sounds like Tableau, but it’s entirely different.) This is a good thing, as Tabula can help you get to the data locked up in .PDFs, which I find enormously helpful.

After class, I’ll keep this blog post up for anyone who needs to look back and reference anything. Given that I seldom update my blog, much to my own chagrin, folks should have no trouble locating this particular entry!