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

Visualizing dates and times

In your analysis, you will often want to understand when something happened. You'll ask questions like the following:

  • When did we gain the most new customers?
  • What times of day have the highest call volume?
  • What kinds of seasonal trends do we see in sales and profit?

Fortunately, Tableau makes this kind of visual discovery and analysis easy.

Date parts, date values, and exact dates

When you are connected to a flat file, relational, or extracted data source, Tableau provides a robust built-in date hierarchy for any date field.

Cubes/OLAP connections do not allow for Tableau hierarchies. You will want to ensure that all date hierarchies and date values you need are defined in the cube.

To see...