Shortcut Keys and other things on Surface Pro 3…

I’ve been using the Surface Pro 2 since it came out and my work just upgraded me to the 3. It is a fantastic laptop replacement capable of being my one and only device (from tablet to development box). Battery life and weight are awesome. The screen and display are a joy to work on,…

Comments and Whitespace in Excel Formulas

A couple of silly little tricks, but ones I find useful. Far too often I end up trying to decode a complicated Excel formula and wanting to make it easier to read and leave comments behind. The tricks below work in Excel 2010 and 2013. I don’t use 2007 any more but expect they would…

Connecting Tableau to Web Data (part 2) – Quandl

My main goal is to connect Tableau in an easy way to my company’s Asp.Net WebAPI site. We use JSON as our interchange format between server code (C#) and the client code (JavaScript and HTML). While that data is only available within my company network it is easy enough to find some JSON data sources…

Tableau Visualisation of Primary School Places in Bromley

I thought, mostly because I wanted to play, I would put together my first Tableau Public work book showing the distances each of the Primary Schools in my area took. We went through this process last year with our eldest and as distances have contracted so much wanted to see what it looked like. As…

Connecting Tableau to Web Data (part 1)

I am starting to use Tableau more at work and find it to be generally very good. We have a reasonably large code base built in C#. More and more we have been developing our in-house tools as Web apps within Asp.Net MVC and Asp.Net Web API. In general we use JSON for passing data…

Stupid Date Formats…

I have the annoying task of converting a text file into data (sufficiently annoying I am motivated to create my long delayed blog!). Within the same file there were two date entries: Mon Oct 06 05:19:38 EDT 2014 201486 The first is simple enough, though as quick search will show that EDT could refer to either Eastern…