Happy New Year's everyone! Hopefully, you all had a fabulous holiday ringing in 2016. We had a pretty busy year last year - and I have a feeling more exciting things are bound to happen this year! Let's take a look into how we wrapped up 2015 -

Announcements

The first Think Data Thursday of 2016 has been announced. You won't want to miss Think Data Thursday: JavaScript API UX of the Future. Learn more and register so you don't miss it!

We finally got the translation back up and running at the beginning of last week. Sorry for the inconvenience. For more information, check out FAQ: Tableau Community Translations

I don't know how many of you are Star Wars fans, but over the holidays, I went and saw The Force Awakens and was left wanting more. Well, our social media team put together a fun activity of gathering and sharing the Star Wars data. If you missed it, check out what some people created: Star Wars: The Vizzes Continue | Tableau Software

Recognition

A relatively new user (well, he joined in May 2015, but has been pretty active the last 2 weeks, Bill Saltmarsh has achieved the "Help Desk" badge, meaning 5+ of his answers have been marked as correct. But even better than that, is that of the 8 threads that he has participated in, 5 of those have been marked as correct - that's a pretty good percentage! Hopefully, we'll continue to see you helping people out in the community, Bill

Most Talked About Thread

Michael Lawton joined the Tableau Community last week and asked his first question on the same day - Can anyone help me figure out how to do this? Enter Bill Lyons and Norbert Maijoor. Both supplied Michael with example workbooks that use Level of Detail calculations. Bill went into detail about what he did and how the calculations worked. He also made some suggestions to unpivot the data so that only one calculation needed to be created instead of multiple. All of this information helped Michael get the answer that he needed and gave him the results he was expecting.

(One of the) Top Viewed Threads

In August, Rody Zakovich branched off this thread about LOD calculations Should I use FIXED or INCLUDE/EXCLUDE? It's a great thread, as it got replies from several people who go into detail about LODs and the differences in using different functions from people such as Mark Jackson, Jonathan Drummey, Simon Runc, and Bora Beran. It's definitely a good read. One of the takeaways that I found interesting is how Jonathan approached creating a viz, and how it varies whether he has a goal in mind vs. wanting to explore.

Top Voted Idea

In November, Shawn Wallwork created Stop Changing Filters & Colors When Replacing Data Source. This was the same top voted idea as last week. It received 6 votes, giving a total of 52 votes. Shawn also added a comment to the idea with another idea for the Tableau Dev team - "Fix-the-little-stuff-a-thon." I'll definitely be sending this information to the Dev team, if they haven't already seen it

In Other News

• Somehow I missed this one last week, so I'm sharing it this week. Tableau's Matt Coles created something called VizAlerts to let you receive email notifications when your data hits a specific threshold (if you haven't seen it, then definitely check out VizAlerts). However, he wrote a long thread about how we use VizAlerts at Tableau. Check it out to get some inspiration: Success stories using VizAlerts at Tableau
• Shawn Wallwork has been creating a bunch of educational brain teasers that last couple of weeks, and last week he created another: Educational Brain Teaser: Drawing Lines Through Marks. It received replies from several people, but ultimately, he marked Anna Lytvyn as the winner. See if you can solve it first before checking out how others solved the teaser.
• matthew.selwood was having trouble getting Tableau Server + SharePoint 2013 + AD authentication to all work together. Jeff Strauss and Toby Erkson gave him some places to start for investigation. However, ultimately, he created a case with the Tableau Support team who was able to solve the issue. Matthew came back and shared the solution so that anyone else who runs into this can hopefully benefit too. Thanks Matthew!
• Sithum Munasinghe needed some help Mapping data fields with his Redcap data source to get the data to be setup. He provided a sample Excel file, and Norbert Maijoor was able to provide a solution that worked. Sithum was beyond greatful and marked Norbert's solution as correct. I love seeing this sort of appreciation from people who are being helped!
• Joe Oppelt asked for some Ideas for equal-sized bars from sheet to sheet. He received some responses for workarounds from Pooja Gandhi, Shawn Wallwork, and Gerardo Varela, who ultimately gave Joe a solution he could use (though not technically supported by Tableau).

I hope everyone has a great rest of their week!

As always, feel free to send any comments, suggestions, or submissions for this digest my way at trodgers@tableau.com

Until next week, happy analyzing!