As of 2019, Tableau has been hailed as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms not once, twice, or thrice, but for seven consecutive years. This means it is being widely used and adapted by numerous individuals and organizations in their everyday analytical tasks especially in visualizing insights.
In this article, you will be geared-up with knowledge you need to start using and exploring Tableau. If you’re looking for powerful flexibility in terms of interactive data visualization, this tool won’t disappoint you.
Tableau supports a lot of data connections. Connect by selecting specific files or connect to a server where the data is stored in a database. Upon opening of the application and starting from scratch, the connect pane is visible by default. To hide and show the pane, just click the Tableau icon (inside the red box of the screenshot).
Once connected to the files or data source, you’ll be redirected to the preprocessing stage of Tableau (see above screenshot).
Connection Option - the rule of thumb is if your machine and/or internet speed is fast enough to handle vast amount of data in real-time, even in calculation-specific processes, you can use the live option. Otherwise, go to the most preferred option by many which is the extract.
Data Source Filter - sometimes, before you explore your dataset, there are a few criteria that you should consider first that need to be applied on your working dataset. Leverage the filter option so you can limit the data to be explored within the Tableau application.
Files - if the repository of the files you choose or data source you connected with have several other files or data sources to choose from, they will appear in this section. This is handy for you in case you want to add some of them in your data exploration.
New Union - want to append or combine dataset from one file to another? Use this option to quickly do that. But use this if you are aware that you only need to combine row-wise. This means multiple files or tables needs to have the same count, naming, and order of columns for this feature to work properly.
Data View Menu - this is a collection of other functions related to the viewing experience for your dataset. You might want to arrange in specific order, limit the number of rows, or show hidden fields; all these are possible via this menu.
To create a chart, you must be in a sheet. You can only create one chart per sheet. Each sheet has the content area where you can play with your data and tweak the chart’s attributes to achieve your data visualization goal.
Dimensions - all categorical fields of your data source belong here. You can change their data type by selecting the data type icon before the field name. By right clicking each field, more options are available for you to control it.
There are options such as duplicating the fields for other purposes, splitting the field by delimiter or by user-defined function, and create group, set, or calculation out from the selected field itself.
In Tableau, the set of functions to create more intelligent calculations are called Level of Detail (LOD) functions. This allows the user to dynamically create output based on their specified criteria. Output is either in a form of calculated numbers, filtered data, transformed data (like changing the format of values), or augmented data (like combining several fields).
Measures - every numerical field from your data source will reflect here. Everything you can do with your dimension fields are also applicable with measure fields. Measures give life to the chart by incorporating values into it while dimensions give meaning as they show categories for us to interpret the chart properly.
Filters - Tableau provides many filter options across its different features. Filters in sheet allows you to specifically filter data on the chart and you can also opt out to synchronize the filter across all the sheets.
Marks Shelf - this feature will be your best friend whenever you are working to achieve something related to your chart’s look and how you want data to be shown. This allows you to change colors, size, text, details (disaggregation based on category), and tooltip. You can also change how you would like the chart to be displayed, as in a line chart, map chart, bar chart, density chart, etc.
Show Me - this is a unique feature of Tableau that helps users to select some of the best representation of their insight based on the selected fields. You are not limited to what is presented in Show Me, you can still explore and create your own chart once you are comfortable with doing it so. Toggle on/off the Show Me button to show/hide the pane.
Dashboard is the place where you put all the charts created from separate sheets into one view. Controls and flexibility are limited for each chart but more generic to all sheets. For example, if you put several charts in the dashboard and you feel like changing the color theme, you can easily do it here and apply to all sheets at once.
Dashboard Option - Contains a few other options to enrich the content and enhance the view of your dashboard. You can also see how the dashboard looks on a phone view.
Size - By default, dashboard size is set to cater to desktop browser resolution. You can either set to fixed size or set to specific device size dimension.
Sheets - All your visible sheets can be found here (visible, because you can hide the sheets that you don’t need for your dashboard). Upon hovering, you can see a preview of the sheet.
Objects - These are useful tools to amplify the way you want your dashboard to look and be used. Horizontal and vertical options let you set the positioning of the sheets/charts, text option can add some contextual information, image and web page options add some life visually and interactively into your dashboard, blank provides breathing space, and button and extension extend the capability of your dashboard to just more than viewing of insights.
Arrangement Behavior - Finally, Tableau also gives users the option to either set the sheets or charts in tiled or floating behavior. When you choose tiled, just drag the sheets into the suggested positions you would like them to be placed. If floating is selected, you have the freedom to place them wherever you want and resize each chart however you like.
Tableau knows the importance of storytelling for your insights. That’s why they have added the story feature. This feature enables users to create story presentations right within the tool where they did the visual analysis and dashboard creation.
The options for this feature are not that many because aside from the insights presented, the main focus is how the presenter shows the findings and the end-to-end storytelling process. Through this feature, the presenter can highlight specific insight from a chart (like outlier, negative values, etc.) as well as add other context from other sources like images and screenshots to enhance the storytelling.
To add another story point, click blank (for new visual) or duplicate (for new insight highlighted). Same with the dashboard, you can set the size according to your preference.
There you go! With this fundamental knowledge regarding the usage of Tableau Desktop, you’re all set to become a master of this tool in no time. Just keep on practicing and you’ll get out of that newbie zone soon.