Book Image

Creating Data Stories with Tableau Public

By : Ohmann
Book Image

Creating Data Stories with Tableau Public

By: Ohmann

Overview of this book

Tableau Public is a very useful tool in anyone's data reporting toolbox that allows authors to add an interactive data element to any article. It allows investigative journalists and bloggers to tell a “data story”, allowing others to explore your data visualization. The relative ease of Tableau Public visualization creation allows data stories to be developed rapidly. It allows readers to explore data associations in multiple-sourced public data, and uses state-of-the-art dashboard and chart graphics to immerse the users in an interactive experience. This book offers investigative journalists, bloggers, and other data story tellers a rich discussion of visualization creation topics, features, and functions. This book allows data story tellers to quickly gain confidence in understanding and expanding their visualization-creation knowledge, and allows them to quickly create interesting, interactive data visualizations to bring a richness and vibrancy to complex articles. The book takes you from basic concepts in visualization creation, like connecting to data sources, cleansing data, chart types, common functions, map creation, and publishing to the Web, to more advanced functions. It is a great overview and reference guide for beginner to intermediate Tableau Public data story tellers, and covers creation of Tableau Public visualizations of varying complexities.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
10
Index

Tables and databases

Once you have found the data set that's ideal for your visualization, it's helpful to know how data stores are structured and what the different terms are.

Data is stored in tables. A table is an array of items, and it can be as simple as a single word, letter, or number, or as complicated as millions (or more) of rows of transactions with timestamps, qualitative attributes (such as size or color), and numeric facts, such as the quantity of the purchased goods.

Both a single text file of data and a worksheet in an excel workbook are tables, though this may not be apparent. When grouped together in a method that has been designed to enable a user to retrieve data from them, they constitute a database. Typically, when we think of databases, we think of the Database Management Systems (DBMS) and languages that we use to make sense of the data in tables, such as Oracle, Teradata, or Microsoft's SQL Server. Currently, the Hadoop and NoSQL platforms are very...