Book Image

Learning Tableau 2022 - Fifth Edition

By : Joshua N. Milligan
Book Image

Learning Tableau 2022 - Fifth Edition

By: Joshua N. Milligan

Overview of this book

Learning Tableau 2022 helps you get started with Tableau and data visualization, but it does more than just cover the basic principles. It helps you understand how to analyze and communicate data visually, and articulate data stories using advanced features. This new edition is updated with Tableau’s latest features, such as dashboard extensions, Explain Data, and integration with CRM Analytics (Einstein Analytics), which will help you harness the full potential of artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive modeling in Tableau. After an exploration of the core principles, this book will teach you how to use table and level of detail calculations to extend and alter default visualizations, build interactive dashboards, and master the art of telling stories with data. You’ll learn about visual statistical analytics and create different types of static and animated visualizations and dashboards for rich user experiences. We then move on to interlinking different data sources with Tableau’s Data Model capabilities, along with maps and geospatial visualization. You will further use Tableau Prep Builder’s ability to efficiently clean and structure data. By the end of this book, you will be proficient in implementing the powerful features of Tableau 2022 to improve the business intelligence insights you can extract from your data.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
18
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19
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 16.3: 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...