What is it about a piece of software that inspires a community of users to post pictures of themselves holding signs that say, “I love Tableau”, write books and blogs, and spend countless hours volunteering to help others visualize their data? And how is it that a single tool can be embraced and used by everyone from business users, to data analysts, to CEOs? What is it about Tableau that inspires such passion?
Tableau’s uniqueness comes from its paradigm. Tableau is different from traditional BI products that force you to select a chart type and then match data to various components of the chart. You won’t be confronted with wizards or pre-built dashboards that give you some insight at first but fail to deliver additional insight when you need it. Instead, Tableau allows hands-on interaction with data; it’s easy to get into a flow of asking questions, uncovering new insights, raising new questions and answers, and finally designing a data story to share with others.
And, Tableau is fun! It allows creativity and gives freedom to explore, understand, design, and share. Tableau doesn’t lock you into a single path to a solution. Tableau designers feel like artists with data as paint and Tableau as a blank canvas.
Furthermore, Tableau is easy and powerful. The interface is intuitive and you’ll find yourself exploring data and building visualizations and fully interactive dashboards in minutes (in fact, we’ll do just this in Chapter 1, Creating Your First Visualizations and Dashboard!). But Tableau is also very powerful. It allows you to perform deep and significant analyses of your data. The unique paradigm of Tableau allows this easy and powerful combination.
This book presents the fundamentals for understanding and working within this paradigm. This book will equip you with the concepts and practical application that will allow you to use Tableau to explore, analyze, visualize, and share the stories contained in your data.
Chapter 1, Creating Your First Visualizations and Dashboard, introduces the basic concepts of data visualization and shows multiple examples of individual visualizations that are ultimately put together in an interactive dashboard.
Chapter 2, Working with Data in Tableau, explains that Tableau has a very distinctive paradigm for working with data. This chapter explores that paradigm and gives examples of connecting to and working with various data sources.
Chapter 3, Moving from Foundational to More Advanced Visualizations, expands upon the basic concepts of data visualization to show how to extend standard visualization types.
Chapter 4, Using Row-Level, Aggregate, and Level of Detail Calculations, introduces the concepts of calculated fields and the practical use of calculations. The chapter walks through the foundational concepts for creating Row Level, Aggregate, and Level of Detail calculations.
Chapter 5, Table Calculations, is about table calculations, one of the most complex and most powerful features of Tableau. This chapter breaks down the basics of scope, direction, partitioning, and addressing to help you understand and use them to solve practical problems.
Chapter 6, Formatting a Visualization to Look Great and Work Well, is about formatting, which can make a standard visualization look great, have appeal, and communicate well. This chapter introduces and explains the concepts around formatting in Tableau.
Chapter 7, Telling a Data Story with Dashboards, dives into the details of building dashboards and telling stories with data. It covers the types of dashboards, objectives of dashboards, and concepts such as actions and filters. All of this is done in the context of practical examples.
Chapter 8, Deeper Analysis – Trends, Clustering, Distributions and Forecasting, explores the analytical capabilities of Tableau and demonstrates how to use trend lines, clustering, distributions, and forecasting to dive deeper into the analysis of your data.
Chapter 9, Making Data Work for You, shows that data in the real world isn’t always structured well. This chapter examines the structures that work best and the techniques that can be used to address data that can’t be fixed.
Chapter 10, Advanced Visualizations, Techniques, Tips, and Tricks, builds upon the concepts in previous chapters and expands your horizons by introducing non-standard visualization types along with numerous advanced techniques, while giving practical advice and tips.
Chapter 11, Sharing Your Data Story, once you’ve built your visualizations and dashboards, you’ll want to share them. This chapter explores numerous ways of sharing your stories with others.
You will need a licensed or trial version of Tableau Desktop to follow the examples contained in this book. You may download Tableau Desktop from Tableau Software at http://www.tableau.com/. The examples in this book use the interface and features of Tableau 10.0. Many of the concepts will apply to previous versions, though some interface steps and terminology may vary. The provided workbooks may be opened in Tableau 10.0 or later, though you may use any version to connect to the provided data files to work through the examples.
Tableau Public is also available as a free download (http://www.tableau.com/) and may be used with many of the examples. To follow the examples using Tableau Public, you’ll need to use the workbooks as published to Tableau Public. You will find the published workbooks here: http://goo.gl/wJzfDO.
You may use a PC or a Mac to work through the examples in this book. Mac users may notice slight changes in user interface and will need to make note of the following changes in keys and clicks:
Right-click can be accomplished by holding the Command key while clicking
Right-click and drag and drop can be accomplished by holding the option (Alt) key while dragging and dropping
Anyone seeking to understand their data and grow in their skills to visually explore, analyze, and present their data stories to others will greatly benefit from this book. While it is assumed that you have some general knowledge of data, you do not need to have in-depth knowledge of databases, SQL scripts, or coding. The book starts with foundational principles and builds upon those to give you comfort with advanced concepts. The goal is not to give a series of steps to memorize, but to give you a solid understanding of working in the Tableau paradigm. Whether you are just beginning or have years of experience, this book will further you in the journey of learning and even mastering Tableau.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, and user input are shown as follows: "We’ll create a calculated field named Floor to determine if an apartment is upstairs or downstairs."
A block of code is set as follows:
IF [Apartment] >= 1 AND [Apartment] <= 3 THEN "Downstairs" ELSEIF [Apartment] > 3 AND [Apartment] <= 6 THEN "Upstairs" ELSE "Unknown" END
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see in the Tableau interface, such as those in menus, dialog boxes or field names, appear in the text like this: "Drag and drop the Customer field to the Rows shelf."
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