Book Image

Learning Tableau 2019 - Third Edition

By : Joshua N. Milligan
Book Image

Learning Tableau 2019 - Third Edition

By: Joshua N. Milligan

Overview of this book

Tableau is the gold standard of business intelligence and visual analytics tools in every industry. It enables rapid data visualization and interpretation with charts, graphs, dashboards, and much more. Updated with the latest features of Tableau, this book takes you from the foundations of the Tableau 2019 paradigm through to advanced topics. This third edition of the bestselling guide by Tableau Zen Master, Joshua Milligan, will help you come to grips with updated features, such as set actions and transparent views. Beginning with installation, you'll create your first visualizations with Tableau and then explore practical examples and advanced techniques. You'll create bar charts, tree maps, scatterplots, time series, and a variety of other visualizations. Next, you'll discover techniques to overcome challenges presented by data structure and quality and engage in effective data storytelling and decision making with business critical information. Finally, you'll be introduced to Tableau Prep, and learn how to use it to integrate and shape data for analysis. By the end of this book, you will be equipped to leverage the powerful features of Tableau 2019 for decision making.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Tableau Foundations
5
Section 2: Leveraging the Full Power of Tableau
10
Digging Deeper - Trends, Clustering, Distributions, and Forecasting
11
Section 3: Data Prep and Structuring
14
Section 4: Advanced Techniques and Sharing with Others

Cleaning and Structuring Messy Data

So far, most of the examples we've looked at in this book assume that data is structured well and is fairly clean. Data in the real world isn't always so pretty. Maybe it's messy or it doesn't have a good structure. It may be missing values or have duplicate values, or it might be at the wrong level of detail.

How can you deal with this messy data? We'll consider Tableau Prep Builder as a robust way to clean and structure data in the next chapter. For now, let's focus on the capabilities that are native to Tableau Desktop, which itself gives a lot of options and flexibility to deal with data issues. We'll take a look at some of the features and techniques that will enable you to overcome data structure obstacles. We'll also lay a solid foundation of a good data structure. Knowing what data structures work...