Book Image

Learning Tableau 2020 - Fourth Edition

By : Joshua N. Milligan
Book Image

Learning Tableau 2020 - Fourth Edition

By: Joshua N. Milligan

Overview of this book

Learning Tableau strengthens your command on Tableau fundamentals and builds on advanced topics. The book starts by taking you through foundational principles of Tableau. We then demonstrate various types of connections and how to work with metadata. We teach you to use a wide variety of visualizations to analyze and communicate the data, and introduce you to calculations and parameters. We then take an in-depth look at level of detail (LOD) expressions and use them to solve complex data challenges. Up next, we show table calculations, how to extend and alter default visualizations, build an interactive dashboard, and master the art of telling stories with data. This Tableau book will introduce you to visual statistical analytics capabilities, create different types of visualizations and dynamic dashboards for rich user experiences. We then move on to maps and geospatial visualization, and the new Data Model capabilities introduced in Tableau 2020.2. You will further use Tableau Prep’s ability to clean and structure data and share the stories contained in your data. By the end of this book, you will be proficient in implementing the powerful features of Tableau 2020 for decision-making.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
9
Visual Analytics – Trends, Clustering, Distributions, and Forecasting
17
Other Books You May Enjoy
18
Index

Connecting to Data in Tableau

Tableau offers the ability to connect to nearly any data source. It does this with a unique paradigm that leverages the power and efficiency of existing database engines or alternately extracts the data locally. We'll look at joins, blends, unions, and the brand new object model in Chapter 13, Understanding the Tableau Data Model, Joins, and Blends. In this chapter, we'll focus on essential concepts of how Tableau connects to and works with data. We'll cover the following topics:

  • The Tableau paradigm
  • Connecting to data
  • Managing data source metadata
  • Working with extracts instead of live connections
  • Filtering data

We'll start by gaining an understanding of the underlying paradigm of how Tableau works with data.