Visual Analytics with Tableau (eBook)

Alexander Loth (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2019
John Wiley & Sons (Verlag)
978-1-119-56022-7 (ISBN)

Infos

A four-color journey through a complete Tableau visualization

Tableau is a popular data visualization tool that's easy for individual desktop use as well as enterprise. Used by financial analysts, marketers, statisticians, business and sales leadership, and many other job roles to present data visually for easy understanding, it's no surprise that Tableau is an essential tool in our data-driven economy.

Visual Analytics with Tableau is a complete journey in Tableau visualization for a non-technical business user. You can start from zero, connect your first data, and get right into creating and publishing awesome visualizations and insightful dashboards.

•    Learn the different types of charts you can create

•    Use aggregation, calculated fields, and parameters

•    Create insightful maps

•    Share interactive dashboards

Geared toward beginners looking to get their feet wet with Tableau, this book makes it easy and approachable to get started right away.

Alexander Loth works in Tableau's Frankfurt, Germany office. He is a Frankfurt Executive MBA graduate with 10+ years in the Enterprise software space focused primarily on Digital Transformation, Big Data, Machine Learning and Business Analytics. At Tableau, he guides organizations to evolve their data-driven culture. Prior to Tableau, Alexander was a Data Scientist at CERN and worked as a consultant for Capgemini and in software engineering at SAP. He is the author of the German-language book Datenvisualisierung mit Tableau (Visual Analytics with Tableau).

Autor

Alexander Loth is a data scientist with over 10 years' experience in the Enterprise software space, focused primarily on Digital Transformation, Big Data, Machine Learning, and Business Analytics. Since 2015 he has been with Tableau Software as Digital Strategist in Frankfurt, Germany where he guides organizations to evolve their data-driven culture. Prior to Tableau, Alexander was a Data Scientist at CERN and worked as a consultant for Capgemini and in software engineering at SAP.

Textauszug

Chapter 1
Introduction and Getting Started with Tableau

Tableau was created to empower people to analyze their data regardless of the level of their technical know‐how. At the core of Tableau is VizQL, an innovative visual query language that translates mouse inputs such as drag‐and‐drop into database queries. This allows the user to quickly find insights in their data and to share the results with others.

Crucially, it is not necessary to know what you are looking for or how you want to present your findings. Instead, with Tableau, you can immerse yourself in data. Through visual analysis, you will be able to unearth patterns and relationships in your data that you might not have known existed. In this regard, Tableau is different from other tools, which often require you to know beforehand in what form you want to display your data.

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce you to the different products that make up the Tableau application suite, the Tableau user interface, and to how Tableau processes your data. We will also introduce the sample dataset that is used throughout this book and provide a first glimpse of the possibilities that Tableau gives you for creating data visualizations.

By the end of this chapter you will be able to:

• Install Tableau on your computer.
• Identify data that is suitable for analysis.
• Create your first data visualization in Tableau.

THE ADVANTAGES OF A MODERN ANALYTICS PLATFORM

The first thing you typically do in Tableau is to connect to a dataset. The data can come from simple files, databases, data cubes, data warehouses, Hadoop clusters, or even different cloud services such as Google Analytics. Next, you interact with the Tableau interface to query your data visually and to display the results in various types of charts and maps. Then, you can collate the individual charts in a dashboard in order to put them into the right context.

Finally, depending on the product used, there are different options for communicating the results with others, from sending individual workbooks, to embedding interactive dashboards, to sharing them on social media. Tableau helps you with both the analysis as well as the communication of results, by providing capabilities such as the creation and sharing of explanatory diagrams, data stories, and interactive dashboards (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 An interactive sales dashboard. We will build this in Chapter 8.

MY PERSONAL TABLEAU STORY

I first came across Tableau in 2009, when I was writing my thesis at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva. I was exploring the landscape of available tools for the visualization and communication of data because I was not happy with the clunky, inflexible solutions that were commonly used back then.

Like most of my colleagues at CERN, I spent a lot of time aggregating data in Python, a popular universal programming language, only to then visualize it in another tool, the command‐line tool GnuPlot. It was a struggle to keep all the scripts well maintained, and even small changes required a lot of time and effort.

When new data came in, the scripts had to be re‐run. The resulting visualizations were, of course, static and didn't offer any interactivity to the end user. And the software packages I used had a lot of dependencies that had to be resolved every time a new version became available.

When I eventually learned about Tableau, I was amazed by the ease of use of the graphical interface and the possibility of being able to interact with my data directly. Every time I dropped another measure or dimension onto the canvas, I got new insights from my data. What used to take me hours could now be done in minutes, and it was fun, to boot! The interactivity of the resulting dashboards and the ability to have them automatically refresh when the underlying data changed sealed the deal for me. I was a fan. I still feel as passionately about Tableau today as I did back then, and I hope to be able to impart some of that enthusiasm to the readers of this book.

THE TABLEAU APPLICATION SUITE

Some readers may have bought this book because they already have one or more Tableau products installed on their machine and would like to jump right in and learn how to use them. But for those who are not so familiar with the different Tableau products, here is a quick overview:

Tableau Desktop Tableau Desktop is an application for Windows and Mac, appreciated by both analysts and business users. In Tableau Desktop, you can connect to flat files (such as Excel and CSV files) and save your workbooks to your local hard drive. To tap into an organization's IT infrastructure, you can also use Tableau Desktop to connect to a host of different database solutions, and you can share your workbooks via Tableau Server or the cloud‐based Tableau Online.

Tableau Prep Tableau Prep is the latest addition to the Tableau product suite and is designed to help you prepare your data before you analyze it in Tableau Desktop. The visual interface allows you to quickly merge differently formatted datasets, clean the data, and unify the level of aggregation. Tableau Prep fits seamlessly into your analysis workflow.

Tableau Server Tableau Server is a platform for data analysis and is used by small family‐run businesses and large Fortune 500 companies alike. It is intended for the organization‐wide provision of data visualizations and dashboards that can be viewed in a browser and are frequently embedded into the organization's intranet.

Tableau Online Tableau Online is a Tableau‐hosted solution for storing and deploying dashboards. It provides similar functionality to Tableau Server but is a cloud‐based service. No purchase and maintenance of server hardware is necessary here.

Tableau Public Tableau Public is a hosting service for the publication of data visualizations to the web. It is used by newsrooms and bloggers but also by companies, research institutes, governmental bodies, and non‐governmental organizations that aim to get their data stories into the public eye. The interactive visualizations can be viewed in the browser directly on the Tableau Public platform, or they can be embedded into blogs and websites.

Tableau Reader Tableau Reader is a free desktop application that allows you to open and interact with Tableau workbook files that have been created in Tableau Desktop. However, it is not possible to make any changes to the visualizations in Tableau Reader.

NOTE   The figures throughout this book show Tableau Desktop version 2019.1, unless stated otherwise. The web‐edit screen of Tableau Server and Tableau Online contains a number of features that you might recognize from Tableau Desktop. But the functionality of the browser‐based products is still limited when it comes to creating new visualizations and dashboards. Therefore, I advise you to install Tableau Desktop on your machine, especially if you are still new to Tableau. The following section will provide more information about the system requirements and the installation process of Tableau Desktop.

INSTALLING TABLEAU DESKTOP

Installing Tableau Desktop is a simple process and takes only a few minutes. Therefore, this will be a very brief section.

System Requirements for Tableau Desktop

Before installing Tableau Desktop, be sure your machine meets the necessary requirements for this application. Tableau Desktop is available for Windows and Mac.

These are the official minimum requirements for a Windows installation:

• Microsoft Windows 7 or later (64‐bit)
• Microsoft Server 2008 R2 or later
• Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Opteron processor or later
• 2 GB RAM
• At least 1.5 GB of free hard disk space

These are the official minimum requirements for a Mac installation:

• iMac/MacBook 2009 or later
• OS X 10.10 or later
• At least 1.5 GB of free hard disk space

Should you wish to work with large datasets, I recommend the following additional specifications:

• Latest service pack or update for your operating system
• Intel Core i3/i5/i7/i9 or AMD FX processor or later
• At least 8 GB RAM
• Solid‐state drive (SSD) with at least 20 GB of free space
• Full‐HD resolution (1920 × 1080 pixels) or higher with 32‐bit color depth

Downloading and Installing Tableau Desktop

If you don't already have Tableau Desktop installed on your machine, use this link to download the latest trial version: https://www.tableau.com/products/desktop.

Make sure you are logged in to your machine as administrator and that you have the rights to install software on the machine. Run the installer as you normally would, given your operating system:

On a Windows Machine Open the setup (EXE) file, and accept any safety prompts from your OS.

On a Mac Open the image (DMG) file, and double‐click the installation package (PKG) file to start the installation.

Follow the prompts during the setup process. Changes to the installation path or similar changes usually are not required.

Registering and Activating Tableau Desktop

Once the installation process is completed, open Tableau...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 8.4.2019
• Vorwort: Nate Vogel, Sophie Sparkes
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Mathematik / Informatik ► Informatik ► Datenbanken
• Themenwelt: Informatik ► Software Entwicklung ► User Interfaces (HCI)
• Themenwelt: Mathematik / Informatik ► Mathematik ► Statistik
• Themenwelt: Mathematik / Informatik ► Mathematik ► Wahrscheinlichkeit / Kombinatorik
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management
• Schlagworte: Alexander Loth • analytical visualization • Big Data Analytics • connect with visual data • Data Analysis • Datenanalyse • how to connect with visual data • <p>Tableau • Marketing tools • Self-Service Analytics • Statistics • Statistik • Tableau guide</p> • Tableau Software • Tableau visualization • Visual Analytics • visual analytics tool • visual analytics tools • visual analytics with Tableau • Visualisierung • visual marketing tools
• ISBN-10: 1-119-56022-5 / 1119560225
• ISBN-13: 978-1-119-56022-7 / 9781119560227