Tableau is an amazing platform for seeing, understanding, and making key decisions based on your data. With it, you can achieve incredible data discovery, analysis, and storytelling. You'll accomplish these tasks and goals visually using an interface that is designed for a natural and seamless flow of thought and work. Tableau accomplishes this using VizQL, a visual query language. You won't have to learn VizQL. It's all done behind the scenes and you won't be forced to write tedious SQL scripts, MDX code, or painstakingly work through numerous wizards to select a chart type and then link everything to data.
Instead, you will be interacting with your data in a visual environment where everything that you drag and drop will be translated into the necessary queries and then displayed visually. You'll be working in real-time, so you will see results immediately, get answers as fast as you can ask questions, and be able to iterate through dozens of ways to visualize the data to find a key insight or tell a piece of the story.
Tableau allows you to accomplish numerous tasks, including:
- Data connection, integration, and preparation: Tableau allows you to connect to data from sources and, if necessary, create a structure that is ready to use. Most of the time this is as easy as pointing Tableau to a database or opening a file, but Tableau gives you the tools to bring together even complex and messy data from multiple sources.
- Data exploration: You can visually explore a dataset using Tableau in order to understand what data you have.
- Data visualization: This is the heart of Tableau. You can iterate through the countless ways of visualizing the data to ask and answer questions, raise new questions, and gain new insights.
- Data analysis: Tableau has an ever growing set of analytical functions that allow you to dive deep into understanding complex relationships, patterns, and correlations in the data.
- Data storytelling: Tableau allows you to build fully interactive dashboards and stories with your visualizations and insights so that you can share the data story with others.
We'll take a look at each of these tasks in the subsequent chapters. This chapter introduces the foundational principals of Tableau and focuses on data visualization. We'll accomplish this through a series of examples that will introduce the basics of connecting to data, exploring and analyzing the data visually, and finally putting it all together in a fully interactive dashboard. These concepts will be developed far more extensively in the subsequent chapters. But don't skip this chapter, as it introduces key terminology and foundational concepts, including:
- Connecting to data
- Foundations for building visualization
- Visualizing the data
- Creating bar charts
- Creating line charts
- Creating geographic visualizations
- Using Show Me
- Bringing everything together in a dashboard