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

Sparklines

Sparklines are visualizations that use multiple small line graphs that are designed to be read and compared quickly. The goal of sparklines is to give a visualization that can be understood at a glance. You aren't trying to communicate exact values, but rather give the audience the ability to quickly understand trends, movements, and patterns.

Among various uses of this type of visualization, you may have seen sparklines used in financial publications to compare the movement of stock prices. Recall, that in Chapter 1, Taking Off with Tableau, we considered the initial start of a Sparklines visualization as we looked at iterations of line charts. Here is a far more developed example:

Figure 10.6: Spark Lines give you a quick glance at the "shape" of change over time across multiple categories

You can build a chart like this by following these steps:

  1. Start with a simple view of SUM(Sales) by Quarter of Order Date (as a date...