Book Image

Tableau 10 Complete Reference

By : Joshua N. Milligan, Tristan Guillevin
Book Image

Tableau 10 Complete Reference

By: Joshua N. Milligan, Tristan Guillevin

Overview of this book

Graphical presentation of data enables us to easily understand complex data sets. Tableau 10 Complete Reference provides easy-to-follow recipes with several use cases and real-world business scenarios to get you up and running with Tableau 10. This Learning Path begins with the history of data visualization and its importance in today's businesses. You'll also be introduced to Tableau - how to connect, clean, and analyze data in this visual analytics software. Then, you'll learn how to apply what you've learned by creating some simple calculations in Tableau and using Table Calculations to help drive greater analysis from your data. Next, you'll explore different advanced chart types in Tableau. These chart types require you to have some understanding of the Tableau interface and understand basic calculations. You’ll study in detail all dashboard techniques and best practices. A number of recipes specifically for geospatial visualization, analytics, and data preparation are also covered. Last but not least, you'll learn about the power of storytelling through the creation of interactive dashboards in Tableau. Through this Learning Path, you will gain confidence and competence to analyze and communicate data and insights more efficiently and effectively by creating compelling interactive charts, dashboards, and stories in Tableau. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Learning Tableau 10 - Second Edition by Joshua N. Milligan • Getting Started with Tableau 2018.x by Tristan Guillevin
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
8
Deeper Analysis - Trends, Clustering, Distributions, and Forecasting
Index

Dashboard objectives


Every dashboard seeks to tell a story by giving a clear picture of a certain set of information. Before designing a dashboard, you should understand what story the data tells. How you tell the story will depend on numerous factors such as your audience, the way the audience will access the dashboard, and what response you want to elicit from your audience.

Stephen Few defines a dashboard as a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives; consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance. This definition is helpful to consider because it places some key boundaries around the data story and the way we will seek to tell it in Tableau. In general, your data story should follow these guidelines:

  • The story should focus on the most important information. Anything that does not communicate or support the main story should be excluded. You may wish to include that information in other dashboards...