B-I-N-G-O Template
One thing I’m really passionate about is helping people along their Tableau journey. Whether that’s pointing them towards the great resources that the community puts out or cheering for them. One idea I had to do this in a fun way was to make a Datafam Bingo. Unfortunately for me, it was not nearly as popular as I thought it was going to be (which is partially on me for not promoting it enough). But I still think the idea is good. Even expanding outside of encouraging people’s Tableau involvement. I think gamifying regular things is a great way to incentivize participation. And several people have contacted me about doing something similar in their communities or organizations (check out this board I made with Tableau to market the Tableau Conference).
Because of that, I wanted to make it easy to reuse this board if you too want to use it in your own spaces!
One mild modification to this board from my original is that it’s a 4x4 instead of a 5x5.
What You Need to Know
The Board
There are 3 components to this board. The first is that it displays what would be necessary to do in order to get that square. The second is the tooltips. You may want to provide more information for how to get that square. Especially if you’re trying to save real estate with the text. This is also a good place to put exceptions/caveats if there are any. The third is that you can track your progress by clicking on the squares (I explain the mechanics of this later in the blog). Selecting a square will change the color. This makes it easier to find out if you got a bingo. But in case your users are not familiar with bingo there’s a message at the top of the grid. It says to keep trying until the user has a bingo and then it says bingo.
Resources
There’s a separate tab for resources. This tab is entirely optional but I think it helps direct your users to links they may need to complete the tasks. For example, if you’re using this to incentivize learning among your employees and one of the squares says to watch a video online, you can link to it here.
Rules & Prizes
This explains how you would achieve bingo for people who may be unfamiliar. It also tells them what they could win for getting a bingo. That part may or may not be applicable to the way you’re using it.
Mobile
There is a mobile specific layout for the board and the rules and prizes but not the resources tab.
What You’d Need to Change
The Data
There’s 6 columns. The X and Y columns (A & B) are just the coordinates for the squares and don’t need to be changed. The other 4 will.
Square - what displays on the square
Description - what’s in the tooltip of the square
Resource - how the resource will help them
Resource Link - the link to the resource
Feel free to remove the final two columns if you don’t want to include resources. Just make sure to remove that tab.
The Dashboard
You’ll need to replace the background to be whatever you’d like the design to be. There is a default and phone version but remove the mobile one if you’d like. You will also need to replace the image in the show/hide container for Rules & Prizes. Alternatively, you could get rid of this as well. The only other thing you’ll need to change is the color of the squares and the message to match your design. The squares have a two-stepped diverging color palette. One color is the square when nothing is selected and the other is when it is selected. The color for the message is categorical with one color (the same as the squares) for when the game is in progress and another for a Bingo.
How It Works
Coloring the Squares
This is a pretty simple set action. Originally I had the set based on the square text but later changed it to work better with the calculations for the bingo. Now it’s based on a calculated field that combines the X and Y coordinates. Selecting the squares adds the value to the set, and changes the color, and clearing the selection removes them all from the set.
The Bingo
This was really hard and actually probably the reason it took me so long to put this out. I feel like there’s a smarter, more efficient way to do this than what I did. But what I did works so I’ll explain it here. The tricky part about this is not giving a false bingo if the user clicks a lot of squares. I have 3 calculated fields per type of bingo that feeds into one larger bingo calc. The first type of bingo is horizontal. This bingo occurs when there are four squares straight across or in other words four squares with the same Y coordinate and 4 different X coordinates. So I wrote an IF statement checks for the distinct count of X coordinates in the set being 4 AND the count of any one Y coordinate being 4. The vertical bingo calc is just the reverse of this - four distinct y coordinates and 4 of the same X coordinate. The diagonal one was much harder and this is the calc I feel could be the most improved on. I couldn’t really think of a logic that’s consistent for both types of diagonal bingos (top left to bottom right and top right to bottom left). So this calc actually just checks to see if the four coordinate pairs exist in the set. A simpler way to achieve this (simpler as in easy but definitely not less) would be to check every combo of coordinates to get a bingo in one calc. There’s ten ways to get a bingo and four coordinate pairs per bingo so you’d have to write out forty pairs. Stay tuned for the blog I write about when to realize that something working is enough.
I hope you guys come up with some really rad ways to use this. I imagine this will show up in majority work spaces but if you’re a nerd like me (and if you’ve gotten through this much of this blog I assume you are) think about ways to use it in your personal lives! Will my bachelorette party have a Tableau bingo board? Maybe!
