Month: January 2015

I signed up for Tableau Online this week.  To understand why this was sort of a big deal for me, let me give you some background.  First, I love Tableau.  I've been a heavy user for over 5 years now.  If you do any sort of data wrangling, I urge you to give it a try.  While Excel is and has always been a great tool for exploring data, Tableau is in a whole different league.  It allows you to view/experience/feel/flip/play with data in so many ways with so little effort.  That's a huge advantage when you are trying to understand the story behind a data set.  The biggest tradeoff I've always claimed about Tableau is that it's a great analyst tool (for exploring data), but it's a poor enterprise…

Before I get into this post, I want to make sure that everyone gets the tongue-in-cheek nature of the post title and image, so please check the meme reference if you're not sure.  Now that I've got my implicit disclaimer out of the way, let's start by talking about sports analytics.  I'm a bit of a fanboy when it comes to sports analytics.  It's a mashup of two of my true passions.  I'm the data nerd who plays fantasy baseball and fantasy football every year.  I haven't been to the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, but I'm sure I'll make it some day.  I'm a runner and I chart out my race times year over year.  I have a wi-fi enabled scale that tracks my weight.  If the Arizona Diamondbacks' Director of Analytics…