Book Image

Learning Tableau 10 - Second Edition

Book Image

Learning Tableau 10 - Second Edition

Overview of this book

Tableau has for some time been one of the most popular Business Intelligence and data visualization tools available. Why? Because, quite simply, it’s a tool that’s responsive to the needs of modern businesses. But it’s most effective when you know how to get what you want from it – it might make your business intelligent, but it isn’t going to make you intelligent… We’ll make sure you’re well prepared to take full advantage of Tableau 10’s new features. Whether you’re an experienced data analyst that wants to explore 2016’s new Tableau, or you’re a beginner that wants to expand their skillset and bring a more professional and sharper approach to their organization, we’ve got you covered. Beginning with the fundamentals, such as data preparation, you’ll soon learn how to build and customize your own data visualizations and dashboards, essential for high-level visibility and effective data storytelling. You’ll also find out how to so trend analysis and forecasting using clustering and distribution models to inform your analytics. But it’s not just about you – when it comes to data it’s all about availability and access. That’s why we’ll show you how to share your Tableau visualizations. It’s only once insights are shared and communicated that you – and your organization – will start making smarter and informed decisions. And really, that’s exactly what this guide is for.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
8
8. Deeper Analysis – Trends, Clustering, Distributions, and Forecasting

Using background images


Background images allow you to plot data on top of any image. Consider the possibilities! You could plot ticket sales by seat on an image of a stadium, room use on the floor plan of an office building, the number of errors by piece of equipment on a network diagram, or meteor impacts on the surface of the moon.

In this example, we'll plot the number of patients per month in various rooms in a hospital. We'll use two images of floor plans for the ground floor and 2nd floor of the hospital. The data source is located in the Chapter 10 directory and is named Hospital.xlsx. It consists of two tabs: one for patient counts and another for room locations based on the x/y coordinates mapped to the images. We'll consider shortly how that works. You can view the completed example in the Chapter 10 Complete.twbx workbook or start from scratch using Chapter 10 Starter.twbx.

To specify a background image, use the top menu to navigate to Map à Background Images and then click the...