You've Got Email

In my recent Mentor Match viz, I wanted to add email functionality when you clicked on someone's name. There were two reasons for this.

• ​I didn't want all of the email addresses to be shown all at once.
• ​I wanted it to be easy to facilitate a possible connection between mentor & mentee.

​How did I accomplish this?

I thought a url action in Tableau was the way to go. But what was the url? That's when I turned to my trusty friend, Google. I found these instructions in Tableau's knowledge base.

So that's what I did.

When you select a person in the viz, this is what it looks like.

I encountered some issues. Whomp whomp. When I was on my laptop, it didn't work for me. But I had Matt Francis test it and it worked for him. So I figured it was me. And then I got a couple of tweets about it not working.

My first thought was, what did I do wrong?
My second thought was, but I had someone test it. So why is this happening??

My second thought was more productive. I didn't do anything wrong. Going into problem solving mode, me & a couple of Twitter folks figured out that there's an issue with the email functionality on Windows machines, but not on Apple (the screenshot above is from my iPhone). I built this in v10 beta, so I'm going to report it in case it's related to v10.

So I think there are a few takeaways from this.

• ​Email is great functionality to add to a viz.
• Anytime you're new to using functionality, trust in yourself, especially if you've had it reviewed/tested.
• No viz will be 100% perfect 100% of the time.
• Community members are more supportive than not, so no one is going to tell you you're an idiot. So try the new thing and put it out there.