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

Improving popular visualizations


Most popular visualizations are popular for good reasons. Basic bar charts and line graphs are familiar, intuitive, and flexible, and are thus widely used in data visualization. Other less basic visualizations such as bullet graphs and Pareto charts may not be something you use every day but are nonetheless useful additions to the data analyst's toolbox. In this section, we will explore ideas to tweak, extend, and even overhaul a few popular chart types.

Bullet graphs

The bullet graph was invented by Stephen Few and communicated publically in 2006 through his book Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data. Stephen Few continues to be a strong voice in the data visualization space through his books and his blog, http://www.perceptualedge.com/. Bullet graphs communicate efficiently and intuitively by packing a lot of information into a small space while remaining attractive and easy to read. Understandably, they have gained much...