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Tableau at a Glance

World of Data Visualization

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.
Data Visualization is an inevitable aspect of business analytics. As more and more sources of data are getting discovered, business managers at all levels embrace data visualization softwares, that allow them to analyze trends visually and take quick decisions. Currently, the most popular tools for visualizations / data discovery are Qlikview and Tableau. 
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. This path will help you to learn Tableau in a structured approach. Beginners are recommended to follow this path religiously. If you already have some background, or don’t need all the components, feel free to follow your own paths and let us know how did it turn out to be!
Why Data Visualization 

Before starting our journey with Tableau, I want to emphasize “Why data visualization is important and how it helps business to take smarter decisions?"

What’s so cool about Tableau?

There are  numerous tools available to perform data visualization, then why Tableau? Check out the video below to get the answer:
As per Gartner’s magic quadrant 2015, Tableau is a market leader across all the BI products.
Gartner, Tableau, Magic Quadrant

Time to download and install Tableau

Tableau offers five main products catering to diverse visualization needs for professionals and organizations. They are:
  • Tableau Desktop: Made for individual use
  • Tableau Server: Collaboration for any organization
  • Tableau Online: Business Intelligence in the Cloud
  • Tableau Reader: Let you read files saved in Tableau Desktop.
  • Tableau Public: For journalists or anyone to publish interactive data online.

Quick Features

  1. Tableau Public and Tableau Reader are free to use, while both Tableau Server and Tableau Desktop come with a 14 days fully functional free trial period, after which the user must pay for the software.
  2. Tableau Desktop comes in both a Professional and a lower cost Personal edition. Tableau Online is available with an annual subscription for a single user, and scales to support thousands of users. Tableau have gone through different versions, here we will discuss the learning curve of Tableau Desktop 9.0.
You can download trial version of Tableau Desktop from Tableau website but it is available for 14 days only.  Install it in on your machine by following steps and start for your data visualization journey.
After 14 days, you can continue your data visualization journey using Tableau public but it comes with its limitations and you have to share your data publicly.

Getting Started with Tableau

Tableau provides Free Online, Live and Classroom (paid) training programs. This is the best place to start your journey. I would recommend you to follow the path below. Here is Free Online training (“On demand”) with additional resources. All these videos contain the data set to explore at your end.
To watch these training videos, first you need to register yourself. Expand the “Getting Started” section and watch available three videos. These videos will talk about connecting with data, data preparation, building views, filters, dashboards, story points and ways to distribute.

Connecting With Data

Tableau can connect with various data sources such as text, excel file, databases to big data queries also. In this section, we will look at the basics and advance feature of data connectivity with different sources.

Creating Views and Analysis

Tableau has multiple options to represent data in different views, applying filters /drill downs /formatting, creating sets, groups, generating trend lines and performing forecasting. Start exploring 

Advance Expressions

Besides the available measures and dimensions, you can create a calculated expression to develop a new visualization. It may be based on date, mathematical logic, text expressions, input parameters and others. For Data scientists, they can connect tableau with R to enhance the power for analytical inferences.

Advance Visualization Methods

Tableau has awesome features to create advanced visualizations. We can generate advance charts in Tableau by playing with some of the properties of objects. Below is the list of advance visualization methods which helps to represent the data in more effective way:
  • Waterfall Charts
  • Bump Charts
  • Funnel Charts
  • Box Plot
  • Pareto Charts
  • Histograms and Others

Introduction of Tableau Server and Online

Using Tableau server and Online, you can schedule the tasks and provide authorization to enable data security. It is a job of Tableau administrator but having understanding about these concepts always help you in dashboard development. Below are the resources to understand these two concepts more effectively.
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