Book Image

Tableau 10 Business Intelligence Cookbook

By : Donabel Santos, Paul Banoub
Book Image

Tableau 10 Business Intelligence Cookbook

By: Donabel Santos, Paul Banoub

Overview of this book

Tableau is a software tool that can speed up data analysis through its rich visualization capabilities, and help uncover insights for better and smarter decision making. This book is for the business, technology, data and analytics professionals who use and analyze data and data-driven approaches to support business operations and strategic initiatives in their organizations. This book provides easy-to-follow recipes to get the reader up and running with Tableau 10, and covers basic to advanced use cases and scenarios. The book starts with building basic charts in Tableau and moves on to building more complex charts by incorporating different Tableau features and interactivity components. There is an entire chapter dedicated to dashboard techniques and best practices. A number of recipes specifically for geospatial visualization, analytics, and data preparation are also covered. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained confidence and competence to analyze and communicate data and insights more efficiently and effectively by creating compelling interactive charts, dashboards, and stories in Tableau.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Tableau 10 Business Intelligence Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Visualizing forecast


Forecasting is the process of trying to predict what might happen in the future based on historical data and trends.

In this recipe, we will use Tableau's forecasting feature to forecast upcoming floods using flood data from 1985 to 2014:

Getting ready

To follow this recipe, open B05527_06 – STARTER.twbx. Use the worksheet called Forecasting and connect to the MasterTable (FlooddataMasterListrev) data source:

How to do it...

Here are the steps to create the view in this recipe:

  1. From Dimensions, right-click and drag the Began field to the Columns shelf. Choose continuous MONTH(Began):

  2. From Measures, drag Number of Records to the Rows shelf.

  3. Right-click anywhere in the view to show additional options.

  4. Under Forecast, select Show Forecast:

How it works...

Tableau's forecasting feature uses a technique called exponential smoothing, as described in the online documentation at http://bit.ly/tableau-forecasting. Typically, when forecasting, one of the axes needs to be temporal (or date...