Supercharged Tableau Road Trip Photo Album

This is a repost from Tableau’s blog site. Other work items and Tableau dashboards can be found on the Projects page.

During our first road trip 5 years earlier, I posted pics with a daily map I would download from AAA. While planning for our next trip, I know I would do something similar. Tableau had come info my life a year or two prior and I knew I had to use it.

Although I didn’t get the dashboard published until the 3rd night of our trip, it was kept up to date each night thereafter. And I was able to make enhancements along the way.

Once everyone was in bed:

• Download photos from camera.
• Create “blog” entry. This is the simple web page with the photos and captions.
• Update data. Enter hotels, food, gas, mileage. I didn’t have a GPS, so I had to manually search and enter coordinates for the map into the spreadsheet.
• Publish.
• Let everybody know to check it out!

-dw

Ross Perez
Senior Director of International Product Marketing, Snowflake
July 28, 2010

After taking a road trip, most people are less than eager to develop their photos (or download them). A select few may download them and post them to their blog or flickr. But only Dave Ward has used Tableau Public to create an interactive “see what I saw when I was here” app. Click into the image below to link out to the live viz.

This is not as hard as it is awesome. First, Dave created a webpage for each day of his roadtrip with the images and text he wanted to show for each one. Most importantly, he edited their urls to follow a predictable pattern. In other words, the page with photos of Day 1 is http://dwboygenius.com…/myroadtrip/1. That way, he could write the hyperlink action as http://dwboygenius.com…/myroadtrip/Day, so it updates with each click. This makes me want to take a road trip.