What the Tech?!  Tableau Basics for Rehab and Performance Professionals

Rehab professionals and performance coaches are collecting thousands of data points per week. All this data can be overwhelming to make sense of, however data visualization can quickly help people test their assumptions. Tableau is a powerful and free visualization tools that enables people to quickly tell stories and test assumptions about the athletes they work with. Upon completion of this course, users will learn how to QUICKLY use Tableau to visualize their data sets to generate meaningful reports for themselves and relevant stakeholders. This in-turn can lead to actionable findings to enhance practice and player development. 

We encourage people to utilize the many free resources online, however this course is unique because it may be meaningful to those in the rehab and performance field. Often times, the sample data sets and tutorials do a great job teaching Tableau, however the datasets are often generic sales data. The lack of meaningful data to work with leaves may rehab and performance experts bored, and conceptualizing it’s use to their own work is quite difficult. This course has a sample data set and will show users step-by-step how to visualize data to answer a few questions below:

• Is my athlete making significant improvements in power throughout the course of their season, and career here?

• Is our high performance team doing a good job of maintaining power and strength of an athlete as they come back from an injury/surgery?

• Is 10% a good cut-off to use when assessing jump asymmetries? How do I know if someone rehabbing is jumping like when they were uninjured?

• What are the norms and differences between each player and position group?

• How can I use shapes, colors, and tools to tell a story, profile athletes/groups, and make it relevant to stakeholders?

Upon completion attendees can use the sample data or their own data to explore more questions. Although this applies to the clinical and performance side, attendees may find use for their personal and business goals as well (budgeting, outcomes, financial planning, etc.)

This course comes free for those who attended the live “What the Tech series”. We recommend some familiarity with force plate metrics, however any in the performance ore rehab field will find this course relatively easy to follow along.

What’s included

• Rehab and performance relevant dataset of force plate metrics and metadata

• Custom shape folder

• Life-time access to 10 video tutorials (1.5 hours)

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Course Content

1. What is Tableau and why use it? (3 minutes)

2. Downloading tableau (2 minutes)

3. Preparing your data (7 minutes)

   • Organization

   • Importance of metadata

   • Data dictionary

4. Importing data (10 minutes)

   • How to import data

   • Familiarization with the software platform

5. Histograms (7 minutes)

   • Importance of looking at distribution

   • How to create and manipulate bins

   • Selecting correct central tendencies

6. Longitudinal data (11 minutes)

   • How to make line graphs

   • How to customize graph (labels, color, markers, etc.)

   • Adding reference lines (averages, standard deviations, etc.)

   • Utilizing data filters and dynamic filters

7. Bar Charts (15 minutes)

   • How to make bar charts

   • Utilizing color marks and sorting

   • How to sub-group

   • How to convert to data table

8. Box plots (11 minutes)

   • When to use box plots

   • Consideration of axis scaling

   • Visualizing variance

9. Scatterplots (5 minutes)

   • How to make and utilize scatterplots

   • How to customize graphs (labels, color, shapes, etc.)

10. Wrap up (16 minutes)

    • Publishing graphs

    • Creating dashboard

    • Understanding your audience

    • Custom shapes and tooltips

    • Downloading a report or sharing interactive graphs

Speaker