My start in Makeover Monday

My Makeover Monday journey started in Las Vegas and as any good Vegas story should be, it was a little random. You see I was attending my first ever Tableau Conference it was #TC17 and I knew nothing about what was about to happen to me. After traveling for 19 hours and arriving 30 minutes before left, Friday morning was starting to feel a lot like groundhog day, except I thought it was dinner time, luckily when you’re in Vegas it doesn’t really matter what time of the day it is.

I also randomly had a friend from home and 20 members of her family in town for the weekend, ok it may not have been 20 people, but I was jet-lagged and excited to see them and it felt like 20 people. You see, I live in Singapore, but my home will always be New Zealand, and seeing a great friend from my childhood and all her family there was overwhelming. After a David Copperfield magic show and full course buffet at 3 am. Luckily my home crew were also time screwed! I even managed a few catch-ups with the Tableau AsiaPAC crew.

Next thing I knew it was Monday and time to get my agenda in order. I spoke to one of those important organiser looking people and he said a live session was about to start, it was called Makeover Monday, he said it was pretty popular and I might want to head on over. So off I went, to a crowded room of about 300 people, where I managed to push my way in and nab the last seat at the last table in the room. For the next hour I was in awe of these two people, I had never heard of before, yes I think I also live under a rock sometimes, they were: Eva Murray and Andy Kriebel.

They brought up a simple viz..

Then after a quick run-through of the data a bit.ly code and some USB sticks were thrown around the tables the timer went on and we had 60 minutes to complete.

I must admit, I didn’t get very far. You see I managed teams that built Tableau, I knew the power of Tableau, but I couldn’t actually sit down and build Tableau.

Or could I?

Well here is what I built in an hour, of only having completed the Tableau Desktop I course 8 months before and not opening Tableau Desktop again since…

For the record, I reckon I was sitting about here…

Well after a completely overwhelming and crazy time in Vegas I flew back to Singapore via London for work. But the whole time I was thinking about this Makeover Monday thing and how I could be a part of it. I even built a couple more of them. They even made it onto my profile on Tableau Public. I also noticed I was talking about it a lot to my team and Tableau in Singapore.

But I also decided I wasn’t good enough to submit for a viz review. In hindsight I came to learn that viz review is actually one of the best parts of Makeover Monday. Each Wednesday they take your viz and review them, one by one, so you get expert advise for free.
Amazing right?!?!
Anyway, I’m sitting on the fence about it all and I get a call from KJ at Tableau in Singapore telling me that this current weeks Makeover Monday dataset was on Singapore and the viz review would be run in a time that worked for us here, because Andy and Eva are in England and Germany, it’s normally around 12am our time. But this week they were running it at 4pm our time and would I consider submitting for review.

Now this was definitely going way out of my comfort zone. But thought, why not, what’s the worst that could happen? Oh and somehow decided to put a little extra pressure on myself and have my team in the room and via VC watching the live review as well. So I built my first ever Makeover Monday for review in 2017 week 50.

Pre review it looked like this…

There we loads of vizzies up for review that week and mine was almost missed, but again as luck would have it I managed to get the last seat, or review in this case. Eva and Andy were actually pretty kind they made a couple of minor suggestions but overall liked what they saw, When I got home that night, I took note of their suggestions and updated my viz to look like this…

Removing the halo from the map circles and filling in the stars. Some basic formatting that made the overall visualization better. I resubmitted my viz and was chosen as one of the week's favorites, along with some other great works…

Which was basically all the encouragement I needed. To kick start my 2018 year of Makeover Mondays.

Related posts:

I am kinda using Rapid Miner for a few University Projects , thought i would share some things i learned during the process , this is just about getting data from specific twitter accounts . Use the…

Tony Kushner adapted (yes he of wondrous Angels in America) and staring the sublime Lesley Manville and introducing to the NT stage the phenomenal Hugo Weaving. This is GOLD. No, this is PLATINUM…

Memorable hikes should always be filled with stories of good scenery, says Benjamin Westover of Idaho. Even more because pictures of those are what you can bring home. So, here are some the most…