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Introduction
If you’re accustomed to the function within Microsoft Excel, I’m sure you might have come across some limitations to the charts feature in creating beautiful yet intuitive charts and dashboards. Excel was made for structuring and shaping data but is lacking in the areas of visualization. This is where Tableau comes in as a great alternative.
Tableau has been rising in popularity over the past few years as a business intelligence visualization tool. You might have heard of it from some analysts or even from some friends within the financial and mathematics fields. Being the mainstay analytics software of many companies, there’s a reason why Tableau is a popular option. Here’s an introduction to Tableau and why it can help you.
1. What exactly is Tableau?
Firstly, Tableau is a data analytics software that allows raw data in multiple forms to be translated into easily-interpreted visualizations. In the rapidly-changing business world, Tableau offers visualizations that can help non-technical users understand business insights.
Secondly, by using simple drag-and-drop functions to build charts, Tableau does not require knowledge of programming languages. These charts are made to be interactive and easily filtered when placed on a dashboard.
2. Tableau Visualization Creation Process
A typical visualization creation process goes something like this:
Tableau is connected to a data source
Data sources can vary from online sources such as cloud or offline Excel sheets or relational databases
Raw data is pulled from the data source live or in extracts
Raw data is joined or blended
Raw data is stored in logical or physical tables
Specific raw data can be queried
Data is put into visualizations
Visualizations are created on sheets and put together on dashboards
Dashboards are shared to business stakeholders
Interactive dashboards are used to dig for deeper business insight
As you can tell from the steps above, the process is made streamlined to a data analytics pipeline where data is converted to information and then to insight.
3. Tableau Products
Tableau Desktop
A desktop application used by analysts to craft visualizations and dashboards. It is the main platform where the dashboard building will be. It features connectivity to Tableau Server and Tableau Online, where the dashboards can be shared and stored.
The desktop application has features for connecting to databases, joining and blending of data tables, cleaning and shaping data, building charts and cards and forming dashboards with those charts. This application is relatively easy to pick up, but also offers advanced data modelling, comprehensive calculations and analytics options.
Tableau Online
As its name suggests, Tableau Online allows visualizations to be viewed and interacted with online in the browser. All visualizations have to be first created within Tableau Desktop before uploaded to Tableau Online. The dashboards and workbooks created are stored in the Tableau cloud, instead of a server by the organization.
Tableau Server
Used primarily as a platform for sharing wookbook visualizations built in Tableau Desktop. This option is great for sharing purposes within an organization, especially in reporting.
Tableau Prep
A simple data-cleansing tool built for quickly preparing data before analysis. For shaping and structuring data to build clean visualizations.
4. How can Tableau help your business?
With the powerful features available across the various products, Tableau is a great alternative to Excel in terms of producing versatile and interactive dashboards. Here are some reasons why it can help boost your business optimization:
- Tableau reduces the technical need for programming
- Tableau simplifies data into business insight
- Tableau offers a large variety of connectors to common data sources
- Tableau produces interactive, highly-shareable visualizations
Need a simple list of ways to get started learning Tableau? Read my other post about it here.
Conclusion:
Overall, Tableau is great for creating simple charts to represent information for business insight. With the function to filter and interact with data points in dashboards, your business may uncover hidden insights that could never have been discovered with the traditional Excel charts.
Related Questions:
What is Tableau Used For?
Tableau is used for creating data visualizations for dashboards. Tableau enables users to produce charts easily using a simple drag-and-drop interface. Tableau users create dashboards by connecting to databases and visualizing them to present business insight to their stakeholders.
My Favorite Learning Resources:
My Recommended Learning Platforms!
| Learning Platform | What’s Good About the Platform? | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Coursera | Certificates are offered by popular learning institutes and companies like Google & IBM |
| 2 | DataCamp | Comes with an integrated coding platform, great for beginners! |
| 3 | Pluralsight | Strong focus on data skills, taught by industry experts |
| 4 | Stratascratch | Learn faster by doing real interview coding practices for data science |
| 5 | Udacity | High-quality, comprehensive courses |
My Recommended Online Courses + Books!
| Topic | Online Courses | Books | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Data Analytics | Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate | – |
| 2 | Data Science | IBM Data Science Professional Certificate | – |
| 3 | Excel | Excel Skills for Business Specialization | – |
| 4 | Python | Python for Everybody Specialization | Python for Data Analysis |
| 5 | SQL | Introduction to SQL | SQL: The Ultimate Beginners Guide: Learn SQL Today |
| 6 | Tableau | Data Visualization with Tableau | Practical Tableau |
| 7 | Power BI | Getting Started with Power BI Desktop | Beginning Microsoft Power BI |
| 8 | R Programming | Data Science: Foundations using R Specialization | Learning R |
| 9 | Data Visualization | – | Big Book of Dashboards |
