Book Image

Mastering Tableau 2021 - Third Edition

By : Marleen Meier, David Baldwin
Book Image

Mastering Tableau 2021 - Third Edition

By: Marleen Meier, David Baldwin

Overview of this book

Tableau is one of the leading business intelligence (BI) tools that can help you solve data analysis challenges. With this book, you will master Tableau's features and offerings in various paradigms of the BI domain. Updated with fresh topics including Quick Level of Detail expressions, the newest Tableau Server features, Einstein Discovery, and more, this book covers essential Tableau concepts and advanced functionalities. Leveraging Tableau Hyper files and using Prep Builder, you’ll be able to perform data preparation and handling easily. You’ll gear up to perform complex joins, spatial joins, unions, and data blending tasks using practical examples. Next, you’ll learn how to execute data densification and further explore expert-level examples to help you with calculations, mapping, and visual design using Tableau extensions. You’ll also learn about improving dashboard performance, connecting to Tableau Server and understanding data visualization with examples. Finally, you'll cover advanced use cases such as self-service analysis, time series analysis, and geo-spatial analysis, and connect Tableau to Python and R to implement programming functionalities within it. By the end of this Tableau book, you’ll have mastered the advanced offerings of Tableau 2021 and be able to tackle common and advanced challenges in the BI domain.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
16
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17
Index

Visualization Best Practices and Dashboard Design

This chapter was particularly influenced by some giants in data visualization and dashboard design—Edward Tufte and Stephen Few. I would also like to draw attention to Alberto Cairo, who has been providing new insights in more recent years. Each of these authors should be considered a must-read for anyone working in data visualization.

This chapter has been written with the intent of empowering you with design knowledge and Tableau-centric techniques for creating effective dashboards.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Visualization design theory
  • Formatting rules
  • Color rules
  • Visualization type rules
  • Compromises
  • Keeping visualizations simple
  • Dashboard design
  • Dashboard best practices for user experience

Now that we have discussed the topics of this chapter, let's dive into design theory, which will provide you with rules that can be applied...