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

Flowing with the fundamental paradigm

The overall paradigm of Tableau Prep is a hands-on, visual experience of discovering, cleaning, and shaping data through a flow. A flow (sometimes also called a data flow) is a logical series of steps and changes that are applied to data from input(s) to output(s).

Here is an example of what a flow looks like in the flow pane of Tableau Prep:

Figure 15.3: An example flow in Tableau Prep

Each of the individual components of the flow are called steps, which are connected by lines that indicate the logical flow of data from left to right. The lines are sometimes called connectors or branches of the flow. Notice that the Aggregate Step here has one line coming in from the left and three branches extending to the right. Any step can have multiple output branches that represent logical copies of the data at that point in the flow.

One important thing to notice is that four of the step types represent the four major transformations...