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Reviewing the Basics

Tableau is one of the leading tools used to solve Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics challenges. With this book, you will master Tableau's features and offerings in various paradigms of the BI domain. As an update to the successful Mastering Tableau series, this book covers essential Tableau concepts, data preparation, and calculations with Tableau, all the way up to Machine Learning (ML) use cases, data governance, and the AI features in Tableau 2026.

This edition comes with new datasets used to learn all about the latest Tableau 2026 features. We will look at AI-powered analytics and explore data governance functionality to guarantee excellent data quality for your workbooks. By the end of this book, you'll have mastered the advanced offerings of Tableau and its latest updates, up to Tableau version 2026.

Those who are fairly new to Tableau should find this chapter helpful in getting up to speed quickly; however, since this book targets advanced topics, relatively little time is spent considering the basics. For a more thorough consideration of fundamental topics, consider Learning Tableau, written by Joshua Milligan and published by Packt Publishing.

Continue reading if you want to gain a solid foundation in Tableau's interface and core functionality—specifically, if you want to learn how to navigate Tableau, connect to data, and design your first worksheets and dashboards. These skills are a steppingstone for more advanced topics covered later in the book. The goal of this chapter is to get you comfortable with Tableau's environment so that you can begin building basic yet effective visualizations. By the end, you'll have the confidence to start exploring more advanced features and workflows.

In this chapter, we'll discuss the following topics:

• Creating worksheets and dashboards
• Connecting Tableau to your data
• Measure Names and Measure Values
• Three essential Tableau concepts
• Exporting data to other devices

Now, let's get started by exploring worksheet and dashboard creation in Tableau.