Tableau

Background

Tableau is heavily used among business analysts and data scientists. As we use Tableau, we will not be covering all the powerful data connections and dashboard tools in the software in our class. We will be focusing on creating different data views for visual analytics in this class. The links below will be used during the semester.

Registration and Download

Tableau provides free access for college students to their professional tools. They also have a Tableau public option for all users. We will be using their training videos and online guides to help us get up to speed with the tool. You will need to create a sign up through the link at the top right of their website to see some of the videos we will use during the semester.

1. Download Tableau Desktop here
2. Select each product download link to get started. When prompted, enter your school email address for Business Email and enter the name of your school for Organization.
3. Activate with your product key found on Canvas.

Students can continue using Tableau after the class is over by individually requesting their one-year license through the Tableau for Students program.

Training materials

Introduction

Getting started

• Tutorial: Get Started with Tableau Desktop
  • Step 1: Connect to your data and Connection to Google Sheets
  • Step 2: Drag and drop to take a first look
  • Step 3: Focus your results
• Use Show Me to Start a View
• Understanding pill types
• Granularity, Aggregation, and Details

A little more introduction depth

Once you are logged in, the first 12 minutes of this getting started video will be the most useful. Here are some other excellent guides.

• Buidling data Views from Scratch and the Getting started with Visual Analytics 6-minute video.
• Additional features of Drag and drop fields
• Measure Values and Measure Names

Saving and exporting your work

• Export Views and Workbooks
• Print Views
• Save your Work

Editing your graphic

Part 1

• Using Shelves and Cards
• Changing the mark or geometry of the graphic
• Editing the marks or geometry
• Reference Lines, Bands, Distributions, and Boxes

Part 2

• Sorting visualization information and a 6-minute video on sorting
• Filters
• Editing tooltips
• Add annotations
• Grouping categories

Common chart types

Primary charts

We will focus on the first few charts in this section.

• Build a Histogram and Create Bins from a Continuous Measure
• Build a Line Chart
• Build a Bar Chart
• Build a Box Plot
• Build a Scatter Plot
• Visualize Benford’s Law

Oh, the charts we can make

Here is a more extensive list of charts from other Tableau enthusiests. Andy Kriebel’s YouTube Channel (Free), who is the Head Coach at the Information Lab. This is a fantastic collection of how-to videos covering all sorts of topics in Tableau. The Information Lab’s YouTube Channel (Free) - another extensive collection of tips and how-to videos from various people at the Information Lab.

The list below provides guides to various chart types from Tableau.

• Build an Area Chart
• Build a Bullet Graph
• Build with Density Marks (Heatmap)
• Build a Highlight Table
• Build a Packed Bubble Chart
• Build a Pie Chart
• Build a Text Table
• Build a Treemap
• Build Combination Charts
• Create a Pareto Chart
• Create a Population Pyramid

Advanced training

• Viz in Tooltips
• Actions
• Showing totals in a visualization
• Create Sets for Top N and Others
• Advanced Filters and a video on interactive filters
• Format Titles, Captions, Tooltips, and Legends
• Drill downs and hierarchies
• Add a Calculated Column to a View
• Calculate Z-scores
• Tableau Starter Kits
• Device designer

Great reads on visualization theory

• 5 tips on designing colorblind-friendly visualizations
• 5 tips on designing text tables
• Visualizing time: Beyond the line chart
• Tableau visualization research

Stuff you should never do

• Spatial Pie Charts Tufte said, ‘The only thing worse than a pie chart is several of them’. But there is nothing worse than 50 pie charts on a map!
• Dual Axes Maybe this can be done once in a while