Book Image

Mastering Tableau 2019.1 - Second Edition

By : Marleen Meier, David Baldwin
Book Image

Mastering Tableau 2019.1 - Second Edition

By: Marleen Meier, David Baldwin

Overview of this book

Tableau is one of the leading business intelligence (BI) tools used to solve BI and analytics challenges. With this book, you will master Tableau's features and offerings in various paradigms of the BI domain. This book is also the second edition of the popular Mastering Tableau series, with new features, examples, and updated code. The book covers essential Tableau concepts and its advanced functionalities. Using Tableau Hyper and Tableau Prep, you’ll be able to handle and prepare data easily. You’ll gear up to perform complex joins, spatial joins, union, and data blending tasks using practical examples. Following this, you’ll learn how to perform data densification to make displaying granular data easier. Next, you’ll explore expert-level examples to help you with advanced calculations, mapping, and visual design using various Tableau extensions. With the help of examples, you’ll also learn about improving dashboard performance, connecting Tableau Server, and understanding data visualizations. In the final chapters, you’ll cover advanced use cases such as Self-Service Analytics, Time Series Analytics, and Geo-Spatial Analytics, and learn to connect Tableau to R, Python, and MATLAB. By the end of this book, you’ll have mastered the advanced offerings of Tableau and be able to tackle common and not-so-common challenges faced in the BI domain.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Tableau Concepts, Basics
9
Section 2: Advanced Calculations, Mapping, Visualizations
16
Section 3: Connecting Tableau to R, Python, and Matlab

Sheet selection

Sheet selection, often referred to as sheet swapping, allows the Tableau author to hide and display visualizations as well as move worksheets on and off the dashboard. These techniques have been used in creative ways with some very impressive results. For example, Tableau Zen Master Joshua Milligan has built various games, including Tic-Tac-Toe and Blackjack, using sheet selection. For our purposes, we will stick to using sheet selection to assist with creating dashboards that adhere to the design principles we've discussed.

In the section Rule: use pie charts sparingly we discussed pie charts and treemaps, we noted that a treemap is a better visualization but people are often more comfortable with pie charts. As a compromise, in the first exercise we will review an example that allows the end user to choose whether to see a pie chart or a treemap.

In the...