Tableau

Tableau Introduction:


Data Visualization is an art of presenting the data in a manner that even a non-analyst can understand it. A perfect blend of aesthetic elements like colors, dimensions, labels can create visual masterpieces, hence revealing surprising business insights which in turn helps businesses to make informed decisions.


Tableau is one of the fastest evolving Business Intelligence (BI) and data visualization tool. It is very fast to deploy, easy to learn and very intuitive to use for a customer. Here is a learning path to all those people who are new to Tableau.


We can connect to 44 different data source types. We can connect to Webpages through web data connectors and other data connectors are Warehouse, sap, google analytics, cubes, sql server, Teradata, oracle, files,etc

We can connect to the data in two ways live or extract as shown in the below screenshot

Tableau is in-memory processing tool, it can connect directly from database servers or through in memory. If we select extract terabytes of data is extracted to in-memory (RAM of the tableau server). If we choose extract all the operations like aggregate will be performed in fraction of seconds, it provides quick performance to your queries, all the visuals like dashboards will be prepared quickly.

One advantage with connect screen using live option is we can filter the data that we want rather than getting the whole data like particular year data you want and all.

Tableau server is web based.

Tableau desktop is development tool ( we develop all types of dashboards, charts, reports).

We need not install any software to use the tableau server or access it.

The moment we connect to a data source, tableau will automatically divide the columns into two parts dimensions (all the text related) and measures (all those which can be aggregated nothing but integers). In addition to analyzing this into dimensions and measures it will also provide an icon adjacent to all the columns denoting whether it is a text field, geographical field or date field and # symbol for measures data. There will be two shelves row shelf and column shelf to drag and drop the data with column shelf on the top where you can drag the numerical data and row shelf for dimension data. You also have marks card containing size, label, color, tooltip, details cards where you can drag and drop the fields accordingly. On top of the marks card you have filter region for filtering the data. You just need to drag and drop the columns for which you need to apply filter and select the values.

ShowMe: this is one of the best feature in Tableau. By dragging any field onto the shelves or by double clicking or selecting any field from the dimensions or measures the showme will automatically highlight the possible charts we can make out based on the selected field. We can just change the chart type within fraction of seconds.

Marks card: will help you enhance the view of the chart by selecting the colors, adjusting the size, hide/show the labels, can change the font size/alignments, can create customized tooltips

We can connect to multiple data sources at a time and show them in one report.

We need to maintain the color consistency for the columns used in different chart types across the dashboard so that we do not confuse the viewers. Qlikview, sas, bo, cognos, etc are some of the analytical tools. Tableau has great features with everything in one tool.

The fields in the tableau terminology are called pills. You can select more than one pill by selecting ctrl key.

Dashboard: You can create a new dashboard by clicking on the icon that is available near the tabbed reports at the bottom.

There is an option while creating dasha3 board to set the size of the dashboard to laptop, desktop, letter portrait, letter landscape,A3 portrait, A3 Landscape, small blog, medium blog, large blog, ipad, etc.

You have many features on this dashboard, we can add text for the dashboard title. If we feel that the text in the charts in the dashboard is cumbersome then we can switch off the labels in that particular chart by going to that report and click on the labels icon on the top of the row/column shelves. If you are able to see scroll bars for any of the charts and want to remove them, just right click on the chart and select fit>>entire view. This will get rid of the scroll bar.

If suppose in the dashboard, you want to understand why the sales of a particular state is very low, then you can concentrate on that particular place to dig deeper by selecting “Use as Filter” option. Just right click on the chart and select “Use as Filter” option and select that particular state which will make the other charts to reflect the data only for the selected state which will help us to find out the reasons or areas where it is having low sales. Since the field selected in one chart is able to reflect the data about the selected field in other charts they are called interacting dashboards.

When there are multiple worksheets on the dashboard and when we try to select one particular measure or dimension in one then it will show the relative data in the other worksheets which is one of the beautiful features in tableau and this feature is interactive.

VizQL-Visual Query Language. Proprietary & patented language by tableau, which is considered as one of the most powerful hidden feature.

When you click on the visual inside without our knowledge there is a SQL. This query language executes and then gets the data and repopulate the data based on the selection criterion. In the connection screen as shown below, this is how we can join both the tables visually on the top of the canvas or can also write our own custom queries.