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

Visualization considerations

Tableau employs good practices for formatting and visualization from the time you start dropping fields on shelves. You'll find that the discrete palettes use colors that are easy to distinguish, the fonts are pleasant, the grid lines are faint where appropriate, and numbers and dates follow the default format settings defined in the metadata.

The default formatting is more than adequate for discovery and analysis. If your focus is analysis, you may not want to spend too much time fine-tuning the formatting until you have moved on in the cycle of analytics. However, when you contemplate how you will communicate the data to others, you might consider how adjustments to the formatting can make a major difference in how well the data story is told.

Sometimes, you will have certain formatting preferences in mind or a set of corporate guidelines that...