Book Image

Mastering Tableau

By : David Baldwin
Book Image

Mastering Tableau

By: David Baldwin

Overview of this book

Tableau has emerged as one of the most popular Business Intelligence solutions in recent times, thanks to its powerful and interactive data visualization capabilities. This book will empower you to become a master in Tableau by exploiting the many new features introduced in Tableau 10.0. You will embark on this exciting journey by getting to know the valuable methods of utilizing advanced calculations to solve complex problems. These techniques include creative use of different types of calculations such as row-level, aggregate-level, and more. You will discover how almost any data visualization challenge can be met in Tableau by getting a proper understanding of the tool’s inner workings and creatively exploring possibilities. You’ll be armed with an arsenal of advanced chart types and techniques to enable you to efficiently and engagingly present information to a variety of audiences through the use of clear, efficient, and engaging dashboards. Explanations and examples of efficient and inefficient visualization techniques, well-designed and poorly designed dashboards, and compromise options when Tableau consumers will not embrace data visualization will build on your understanding of Tableau and how to use it efficiently. By the end of the book, you will be equipped with all the information you need to create effective dashboards and data visualization solutions using Tableau.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Mastering Tableau
Credits
About the Author
www.Packtpub.com
Preface

Single Data Source > Joining > Blending


One of the beauties of Tableau is the ease with which you can connect to many different data sources in various ways. As mentioned earlier in this book, there are 50 connectors defined in Tableau 10 for interfacing with a variety of data sources. Furthermore, this flexibility extends beyond simply connecting to single tables or files. Previous versions of Tableau accommodated joining within data sources and data blending of disparate data sources. Tableau 10 can even accommodate cross-joining data sources.

Although Tableau makes it easy to connect to various data sources, it should be stressed that Tableau is not an Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) tool. If complex joins and complex data blending are required to generate useful results, it may be advisable to perform ETL work outside of Tableau. Such ETL work will ideally lead to better data modeling and thus easier authoring and quicker performance in Tableau.

Three ways Tableau connects to...