30.3.12

Everyday BI - Tableau helps with learning Spanish

I've been in Panama for a couple of months, and trying to learn Spanish. The classes I've been taking are very helpful and I'm much further ahead than I'd otherwise be.

The past few lessons have become increasingly difficult—we're learning verbs, and there's a fair bit of complexity in the relationships between gender, conjugation, subjects, objects, verb stems (some get changed in conjugation, some don't) and so and so forth and such like.

I've been hand-organizing lists and patterns as we go, and this week reached a point where I see something of the "how" of verbs, and it occurred to me that if I could get a list of Spanish verbs and their characteristics it might be helpful to see if I could use Tableau to collate and organize them, and provide lookup  functionality to help find the right verb quickly.

After looking around the web a bit I came across multiple site listing Spanish verbs. So I picked one that seemed reasonably complete, pulled the data off, munged it up a bit, and created a Tableau workbook, which I then published to Tableau Public (below),

It didn't take long to get this up. The bulk of the time was spent munging up the data (a topic for another post), followed by the inevitable fiddling around with presentation and functionality. It's not perfect—there are data problems to be fixed, and I'm undecided on whether to make the verb-finding functionality more capable, but as a first blush effort it's not too bad.

The is an illustration of how the principles of BI can be applied in local, personal situations to help real people (me) achieve information and insights from raw data. BI isn't just for Big Companies any more, it's for everybody.

1 comment:

  1. Looking forward to hear more about what was involved in "munging up the data".

    ReplyDelete