Preface

Data viz, visualization, analytics, visual analytics – these are some of the words that you probably hear more often these days. With the explosion of data, we try to find ways to better analyze and represent them to facilitate understanding and communication.

Tableau is a software package that helps explore, visualize, analyze, and make sense of data. It helps us see different kinds of data in a different light. Tableau makes it easy to connect to different kinds of data sets and understand it more and see what kinds of stories we can unearth. It doesn't matter if it's business data, social data, maybe your fitness tracker data, or a playlist—it is fascinating to see and learn something about our business, our health, our own social network, our world in general.

When I was first introduced to Tableau a few years ago, I had no idea what I was getting into. I had the privilege of taking the Tableau in-person class with Tableau Zen Master, Dan Murray, with just a day or two of Tableau exposure. I was blown away by how powerful and fun this product was to use. It didn't feel like work at all!

I was, and still am, used to writing a lot of code to generate queries and reports. It was almost surreal for me to see how I can create beautiful charts with a few drag and drops. I thought Tableau was easy and almost questioned why I had to take the class.

True, Tableau is easy to use. It is a compliment to the company and the product, because as Steve Jobs once said, easy is hard. To make the product easy to use amounts to a lot of hard work from those who made it happen. I also realize that it was an invaluable experience to take the class from Dan Murray because he was able to share his knowledge, experience, and nuggets of wisdom as he talked about Tableau—something not captured in the workbooks.

Being a bookworm (or book hoarder) though, I wished there were books I could get to supplement what I learned from that two-day workshop. At the time, there were no books on Tableau. Working through the exercises was easy while the instructor was there, but as soon as I left the classroom, I remember scratching my head asking how did I do that again?

I found this same conundrum when I started teaching Visual Analytics with Tableau at BCIT's Part Time program. There were no books available. While there were video tutorials and online documentation, I still needed to have more structure in the classroom. I had to write a lot of notes for students so they would have some easy, accessible references on how to do certain things in Tableau.

This cookbook provides step-by-step instructions on how to build different charts and complete different tasks in Tableau. This book aims to provide a foundation in becoming more comfortable with Tableau—to allow you to see and explore other possibilities.

This book is a labor of love. Mixed with technical details, some nuggets of wisdom, some tips and shortcuts, this is the book I wish I had written for me when I first started learning about the product. This is the book I wish I was able to provide students with when they took my first Tableau courses.

Tableau reignited the curiosity in me. I started becoming more aware and started caring a lot more about data round me. I've enjoyed learning Tableau and still enjoy learning and relearning it as new versions come along. I've enjoyed working different kinds of data.

I hope you enjoy this book, and I hope this book helps you with your own Tableau journey. May the force be with you.