Preface

Tableau is a suite of business analytics and data visualization tools that allows people to explore and analyze data quickly and easily with simple drag-and-drop operations.

Tableau software Inc. (http://www.tableau.com/) was founded in 2003 by Chris Stolte, Christian Chabot, and Pat Hanrahan. What began as a research project in Stanford University between 1999 and 2002 soon changed the way people see and interact with their data. Through the development of a database visualization language called VizQL (Visual Query Language), which is a combination of a structured query language for databases and a descriptive language for rendering graphics, Tableau was able to give great power to the end users and allowed them to visualize and interact with their data with simple drag-and-drop operations.

Giving people the ability to analyze their data and interact with it at the speed of thought, Tableau software empowered end users to ask questions on the fly by using their self-service analysis products suite.

The Tableau product suite – differences between the products

Before we actually get started on any visualization, it would be useful to understand the overall range and purpose of the various products offered by Tableau.

The overall suite of products can be broadly bifurcated into two categories; the ones built for creation of dashboards and visualizations and those built for collaboration, sharing, and management of these dashboards and visualizations.

Tableau Desktop

Tableau Desktop is the primary tool most of us will spend most of our time on. It is where we actually create the visualizations, analytics, and dashboards. It is the tool in which all our development will be done.

Tableau Desktop comes in two editions; the Desktop Professional edition which most of us will typically use, and the Desktop Personal edition, which is typically used by people with limited data connectivity needs. To explain this just a bit further, the Desktop Professional edition is a full feature version that can connect to a wide range of data sources, including flat files as well as large database formats (which we will cover in more detail a bit later). Correspondingly the Desktop Personal edition is a limited version in the sense that it can connect only to flat file formats as a data source (Excel, Access, Statistical files, and so on) and does not give the option to connect to any database formats. However, in terms of all other features, the Desktop Professional and the Desktop Personal editions are essentially identical.

Tableau Public

Tableau Public is a free edition that is very similar to Desktop Personal in most ways. It has virtually the full range of features available in the Desktop editions and connects only to flat file formats and not database formats, but with one key distinction. The Tableau Public edition is meant for anyone wanting to post their dashboards and visualizations on the Web, typically for bloggers, journalists, researchers, and the like dealing with public or open data. Hence, the Tableau Public edition does not allow you to save your work offline to your laptop, but publishes your visualizations directly to the Web, on your Tableau Public account on the Tableau public cloud server. The Tableau Public edition is a great tool for anyone wanting to build great visualizations for public consumption, but is not recommended for anyone working with confidential data.

Tableau Server

Tableau Server is an on-premise hosted browser and mobile-based collaboration platform used to publish dashboards created in Tableau Desktop and share them throughout your organization. It allows you to share, to some extent edit, and publish dashboards within your organization while managing access rights and making your visualizations accessible securely over the Web. It also allows you to maintain live data connectivity to backend data sources, which in turn allows users to view up-to-date dashboards online from anywhere. The Tableau Server also allows you to view your dashboards on a mobile tablet through an app available on iOS as well as Android.

Tableau Online

Tableau Online is a cloud hosted version or SaaS version of Tableau Server. It brings Server's capabilities on the cloud without the infrastructure cost.

Tableau Reader

Tableau Reader is a free desktop application that you can use to open, view, and interact with dashboards and visualizations built in Tableau Desktop. Since the dashboards built in Tableau Desktop can package the data within the workbook itself when you save it, Tableau Reader allows you to filter, drill down, view the details of the data, and interact with the dashboards to the full extent of what the author has intended. That said, it being a reader, you cannot make any changes or edit the dashboard in any way beyond what has already been built in by the author.

With this brief introduction to Tableau's suite of products, you will notice that the entire process of creating a dashboard or visualization is done within Tableau Desktop, and thereby this is the product we will be focusing on for the purposes of this book.

In this book, we will go through a bunch of recipes and create a Tableau workbook. The idea is that we follow the recipes and create them from scratch; however, a final copy of the Tableau workbook has been uploaded on the following link.

https://1drv.ms/u/s!Av5QCoyLTBpnhlRBwZcWGGJKpasC.