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 (17 chapters)
Learning Tableau 10 Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Chapter 9.  Making Data Work for You

Up to this point, most of the examples we've looked at in this book assume that data is well structured and fairly clean. Data in the real world isn't so pretty at times. Maybe it's messy or it doesn't have a good structure. It may be missing values or have duplicate values. It might be at the wrong level of detail.

How can you deal with this messy data? Tableau offers quite a bit of flexibility for addressing data issues within the tool. We'll take a look at some of the features and techniques that will enable you to overcome data structure obstacles. Having a good understanding of what data structures work well with Tableau is the key to understanding how you will be able to resolve certain issues.

In this chapter, we'll focus on some principles for structuring data to work well with Tableau, as well as some specific examples of how to address common data issues. This chapter will cover the following topics:

  • Structuring data for Tableau

  • Techniques...