Book Image

Learning Tableau 2019 - Third Edition

By : Joshua N. Milligan
Book Image

Learning Tableau 2019 - Third Edition

By: Joshua N. Milligan

Overview of this book

Tableau is the gold standard of business intelligence and visual analytics tools in every industry. It enables rapid data visualization and interpretation with charts, graphs, dashboards, and much more. Updated with the latest features of Tableau, this book takes you from the foundations of the Tableau 2019 paradigm through to advanced topics. This third edition of the bestselling guide by Tableau Zen Master, Joshua Milligan, will help you come to grips with updated features, such as set actions and transparent views. Beginning with installation, you'll create your first visualizations with Tableau and then explore practical examples and advanced techniques. You'll create bar charts, tree maps, scatterplots, time series, and a variety of other visualizations. Next, you'll discover techniques to overcome challenges presented by data structure and quality and engage in effective data storytelling and decision making with business critical information. Finally, you'll be introduced to Tableau Prep, and learn how to use it to integrate and shape data for analysis. By the end of this book, you will be equipped to leverage the powerful features of Tableau 2019 for decision making.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Tableau Foundations
5
Section 2: Leveraging the Full Power of Tableau
10
Digging Deeper - Trends, Clustering, Distributions, and Forecasting
11
Section 3: Data Prep and Structuring
14
Section 4: Advanced Techniques and Sharing with Others

Foundations for building visualizations

When you first connect to a data source such as the Superstore file, Tableau will display the data connection and the fields in the data pane on the left Side Bar. Fields can be dragged from the data pane onto the canvas area or onto various shelves such as Rows, Columns, Color, or Size. As we'll see, the placement of the fields will result in different encodings of the data based on the type of field.

Measures and dimensions

The fields from the data source are visible in the data pane and are divided into Measures and Dimensions. The difference between measures and dimensions is a fundamental concept to understand when using Tableau:

  • Measures are values that are aggregated. For...