My boss told me..

My boss indicated that my travel costs were a little high and it gave me the perfect opportunity to test Tableau in real life.

Please note that all numbers in this example are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

1. I found the General Ledger account where the travel expenses are posted in Dynamics AX.
2. I selected all the rows and copied them with <CTRL><C>
3. I saved the rows as an Excel file.
4. I connected live to that Excel file in Tableau.
5. Now I was ready to analyze.

First I selected Purpose and Amount:

Then I added Name and Date and dropped Purpose on the color button on the Marks card:

Now I have an overview:

Color mark

If I want, I can analyze on my data only:

Keep Only

I can see the underlying data:

View data

And I can sleep peacefully because my travel costs have already dropped dramatically by 2014.

Dashboard