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

Understanding Tableau's data-handling engine


Tableau's data-handling engine is usually not well comprehended by even advanced authors because it's not an overt part of day-to-day activities; however, for the author who wants to truly grasp how to ready data for Tableau, this understanding is indispensable. In this section, we will explore Tableau's data-handling engine and how it enables structured yet organic data mining processes in the enterprise.

To begin, let's clarify a term. The phrase Data-Handling Engine (DHE) in this context references how Tableau interfaces with and processes data. This interfacing and processing is comprised of three major parts: Connection, Metadata, and VizQL. Each part is described in detail in the following section. In other publications, Tableau's DHE may be referred to as a metadata model or the Tableau infrastructure. I've elected not to use either term because each is frequently defined differently in different contexts, which can be quite confusing.

Tableau...