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

Tableau Server architecture


Now that we have reviewed the various Tableau file types, we can use that information to understand various ways to architect a Tableau Server environment. Since this is not a book dedicated to Tableau Server, this architecture discussion is presented at a high level. The intent is to help the Tableau Desktop author understand how to interact with Tableau Server so that workbooks best serve the end user:

The preceding diagram visually represents the contents of the four file types that are most relevant when considering how the Tableau Desktop author should interface with Tableau Server. To be clear, the previous section of this chapter provided descriptions of the various file types. Each of these descriptions included the line What it contains. What it contains is visually represented in the preceding diagram.

Each of the four file types listed in the diagram includes metadata; two include data and two include schema.

Let's consider four approaches to Tableau...