My son Aaron is a lego pro. He also likes movies and his iPod. Put those three things together and you get stop motion Lego movies made with an iPod! Genius. He started uploading his videos recently to his new YouTube channel (yeah, that took mom and dad a while to get used to…) so I thought I’d embed his videos in a Tableau

Step 1:
In YouTube, click “Share”, “Embed” and then copy the embed code. You will need only the url betweeen quotes. It should be in the form of “……”

Step 2:
Create a spreadsheet with the information you want to include about each video across the columns, including the embed link url:

Step 3:
In Tableau Public, connect to your spreadsheet, make the chart you want to use to change the video link (in this case, I made a simple bar chart showing the views of each video), and make sure you drag the “Embed” dimension field into Detail, like this:

Step 4:
Next, make a new dashboard, add your chart, and drag a “Web Page” object where you would like to place it (either “Tiled” or “Floating”, whichever you would prefer). When the “Edit URL” dialog box pops up, just leave it blank and click “OK” for now:

Step 5:
Lastly, add a Dashboard Action by selecting Dashboard > Actions > Add Action > URL > and fill out the resulting dialog box as follows:

Click one of the bars, and you should see the video load in the Web Page object box. Viola! Data viz and video, all in one.

As for the “Aaron’s LegoTube” sign, I used this fun Chrome Lego Builder page to make that.


Happy Building,