What is the Iron Viz? The Iron Viz is a data visualization competition and takes place on the third day of the Tableau Conference Europe. Beforehand, participants must take part in a series of qualifying competitions. Only the top three finally qualify for the Iron Viz. One of them was our colleague Simon Stusak.

The time had finally come on 19.4.2019. The three finalists were given 20 minutes to build a tableau dashboard of the last 44 years of the Eurovision Song Contest live on stage from a data set with 50,000 lines. They will be judged by a four-person jury consisting of Tableau experts and previous Iron Viz winners. The dashboards were judged based on the criteria of analysis, storytelling and visual design.

For our colleagues Carolin, Claudio and Paul, who were part of the audience, the competition was an exciting experience. For Simon as a finalist on stage, it was pure thrills! Simon describes the competition as being more about working together than against each other, as he got on very well with his fellow competitors Anna Dzikowska and Tristan Schouten. His sous vizzer Marc Montanari from Tableau also prepared him very well in advance and discussed various dashboard ideas and layouts with him.

In the end, Simon was able to prevail against his competitors and convince the jury with new Tableau 2019.2 functions such as parameter actions and container settings. You can see his result again here.

The whole Hopmann team was thrilled for Simon and was delighted with his success. Congratulations Simon, you deserve it!