June 2014
Beginner to intermediate
334 pages
7h 35m
English
Content preview from Communicating Data with TableauBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 2. Introduction to Tableau
“We help people see and understand data.”
—Tableau Software mission statement
Tableau software helps people communicate data through an innovation called VizQL, a visual query language that converts drag-and-drop actions into data queries, allowing users to quickly find and share insights in their data. The version of Tableau available at the time of writing is Tableau 8.
The goal of this chapter is to help you understand the different types of Tableau software, the basic user interface, how Tableau deals with data, and how data can be visualized in a variety of different ways. If you are already an intermediate Tableau user, you may want to skip this chapter and move on to Chapter 3.
Using Tableau
With Tableau, “data workers” first connect to data stored in files, cubes, databases, warehouses, Hadoop technologies, and even some cloud sources like Google Analytics. They then interact with the Tableau user interface to simultaneously query the data and view the results in charts, graphs, and maps that can be arranged together on dashboards. When it’s time to communicate key insights, there are a variety of options depending on the product being used, from sending files to embedding interactive visualizations online to sharing via social media.
Tableau facilitates the data discovery process (finding insights in data) as well as the data communication process (creating explanatory graphics, exploratory dashboards, and data storytelling) with no programming ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.