Learning Tableau 2019 - Third Edition

Learning Tableau 2019 - Third Edition

by Joshua N. Milligan
Released March 2019
Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
ISBN: 9781788839525

Read it now on the O’Reilly learning platform with a 10-day free trial.

O’Reilly members get unlimited access to books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.

Start your free trial

Book description

Create powerful data visualizations and unlock intelligent business insights with Tableau

Key Features

  • Explore all the latest Tableau 2019 features and redefine business analytics for your organization
  • Create impressive data visualizations and interactive dashboards to get insights from your data
  • Learn effective data storytelling to transform how your business leverages data and makes decisions

Book Description

Tableau is the gold standard of business intelligence and visual analytics tools in every industry. It enables rapid data visualization and interpretation with charts, graphs, dashboards, and much more. Updated with the latest features of Tableau, this book takes you from the foundations of the Tableau 2019 paradigm through to advanced topics.

This third edition of the bestselling guide by Tableau Zen Master, Joshua Milligan, will help you come to grips with updated features, such as set actions and transparent views. Beginning with installation, you'll create your first visualizations with Tableau and then explore practical examples and advanced techniques. You'll create bar charts, tree maps, scatterplots, time series, and a variety of other visualizations. Next, you'll discover techniques to overcome challenges presented by data structure and quality and engage in effective data storytelling and decision making with business critical information. Finally, you'll be introduced to Tableau Prep, and learn how to use it to integrate and shape data for analysis.

By the end of this book, you will be equipped to leverage the powerful features of Tableau 2019 for decision making.

What you will learn

  • Develop stunning visualizations that explain complexity with clarity
  • Explore the exciting new features of Tableau Desktop and Tableau Prep
  • Connect to various data sources to bring all your data together
  • Uncover techniques to prep and structure your data for easy analysis
  • Create and use calculations to solve problems and enrich analytics
  • Master advanced topics such as sets, LOD calcs, and much more
  • Enable smart decisions with clustering, distribution, and forecasting
  • Share your data stories to build a culture of trust and action

Who this book is for

This Tableau book is for anyone who wants to understand data. If you're new to Tableau, don't worry. This book builds on the foundations to help you understand how Tableau really works and then builds on that knowledge with practical examples before moving on to advanced techniques. Working experience with databases will be useful but is not necessary to get the most out of this book.

Table of contents

  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright and Credits
    1. Learning Tableau 2019 Third Edition
  3. About Packt
    1. Why subscribe?
    2. Packt.com
  4. Contributors
    1. About the author
    2. About the reviewers
    3. Packt is searching for authors like you
  5. Preface
    1. Who this book is for
    2. What this book covers
    3. To get the most out of this book
      1. Download the example code files
      2. Download the color images
      3. Conventions used
    4. Get in touch
      1. Reviews
  6. Section 1: Tableau Foundations
  7. Taking Off with Tableau
    1. The cycle of analytics
    2. Connecting to data
    3. Foundations for building visualizations
      1. Measures and dimensions
      2. Discrete and continuous fields
        1. Discrete fields
        2. Continuous fields
    4. Visualizing data
      1. Bar charts
        1. Iterations of bar charts for deeper analysis
      2. Line charts
        1. Iterations of line charts for deeper analysis
      3. Geographic visualizations
        1. Filled maps
        2. Symbol maps
        3. Density maps
      4. Using Show Me
    5. Putting everything together in a dashboard
      1. The Dashboard interface
      2. Building your dashboard
    6. Summary
  8. Working with Data in Tableau
    1. The Tableau paradigm
      1. A simple example
    2. Connecting to data
      1. Connecting to data in a file
      2. Connecting to data on a server
      3. Connecting to data in the cloud
      4. Shortcuts for connecting to data
    3. Managing data source metadata
    4. Working with extracts instead of live connections
      1. Creating extracts
      2. Using extracts
      3. Performance
      4. Portability and security
      5. When to use an extract
    5. Tableau file types
    6. Joins and blends
      1. Joining tables
      2. Cross database joins
      3. Blending data sources
        1. A blending example
    7. Filtering data
      1. Filtering discrete (blue) fields
      2. Filtering continuous (green) fields
      3. Filtering dates
      4. Other filtering options
    8. Summary
  9. Venturing on to Advanced Visualizations
    1. Comparing values
      1. Bar charts
      2. Bar chart variations
        1. Bullet chart – comparing to a goal, target, or threshold
        2. Bar-in-bar chart
        3. Highlighting categories of interest
    2. Visualizing dates and times
      1. Date parts, date values, and exact dates
      2. Variations of date and time visualizations
      3. Gantt Charts
    3. Relating parts of the data to the whole
      1. Stacked bars
      2. Treemaps
      3. Area charts
      4. Pie charts
    4. Visualizing distributions
      1. Circle charts
        1. Jittering
      2. Box and whisker plots
      3. Histograms
    5. Visualizing multiple axes to compare different measures
      1. Scatterplot
      2. Dual axis and combination charts
    6. Summary
  10. Section 2: Leveraging the Full Power of Tableau
  11. Starting an Adventure with Calculations
    1. Introduction to calculations
      1. Creating and editing calculations
      2. Additional functions and operators
      3. Four main types of calculations
      4. Example data
    2. Row-level calculations
    3. Aggregate-level calculations
      1. Why the row-level/aggregate-level difference matters
    4. Level of detail calculations
      1. Level of detail syntax
      2. Level of detail types
        1. FIXED
        2. INCLUDE
        3. EXCLUDE
      3. Level of detail example
    5. Parameters
      1. Creating parameters
    6. Practical examples of calculations and parameters
      1. Fixing data issues
      2. Extending the data
      3. Enhancing user experience, analysis, and visualizations
    7. Ad hoc calculations
    8. Performance considerations
    9. Summary
  12. Diving Deep with Table Calculations
    1. An overview of Table Calculations
      1. Creating and editing Table Calculations
    2. Quick Table Calculations
    3. Relative versus fixed
      1. Scope and direction
        1. Working with scope and direction
      2. Addressing and partitioning
        1. Advanced addressing and partitioning
    4. Custom Table Calculations
      1. Meta table functions
      2. Lookup and previous value
      3. Running functions
      4. Window functions
      5. Rank functions
      6. Script functions
      7. The Total function
    5. Practical examples
      1. Year over Year Growth
      2. Dynamic titles with totals
      3. Late filtering
    6. Data densification
      1. When and where data densification occurs
      2. An example of leveraging data densification
    7. Summary
  13. Making Visualizations That Look Great and Work Well
    1. Visualization considerations
    2. Leveraging formatting in Tableau
      1. Workbook-level formatting
      2. Worksheet-level formatting
      3. Field-level formatting
        1. Custom number formatting
        2. Custom date formatting
        3. Null formatting
      4. Additional formatting options
    3. Adding value to visualizations
      1. Tooltips
        1. Viz in Tooltip
    4. Summary
  14. Telling a Data Story with Dashboards
    1. Key concepts for dashboards
      1. Dashboard definition
      2. Dashboard objectives
      3. Dashboard approaches
    2. Designing dashboards in Tableau
      1. Objects
        1. Tiled versus floating
        2. Manipulating objects on the dashboard
    3. Dashboard example – is least profitable always unprofitable?
      1. Building the views
      2. Creating the dashboard framework
      3. Implementing actions to guide the story
      4. Interlude – context filtering
    4. Designing for different displays and devices
    5. How actions work
      1. Filter actions
      2. Highlight actions
      3. URL actions
      4. Set actions
        1. Sets
        2. A set action example
    6. Dashboard example – regional scorecard
    7. Stories
    8. Summary
  15. Digging Deeper - Trends, Clustering, Distributions, and Forecasting
    1. Trends
      1. Customizing Trend Lines
      2. Trend models
        1. Linear
        2. Logarithmic
        3. Exponential
        4. Power
        5. Polynomial
      3. Analyzing trend models
        1. Exporting statistical model details
        2. Advanced statistics (and more!) with R and Python
    2. Clustering
    3. Distributions
    4. Forecasting
    5. Summary
  16. Section 3: Data Prep and Structuring
  17. Cleaning and Structuring Messy Data
    1. Structuring data for Tableau
      1. Good structure – tall and narrow instead of short and wide
        1. Wide data
        2. Tall data
        3. Wide and tall in Tableau
      2. Good structure – star schemas (Data Mart/Data Warehouse)
    2. Dealing with data structure issues
      1. Restructuring data in Tableau connections
      2. Union files together
      3. Cross database joins
        1. A practical example – filling out missing/sparse dates
      4. Working with different levels of detail
    3. Overview of advanced fixes for data problems
    4. Summary
  18. Introducing Tableau Prep
    1. Getting prepped to explore Tableau Prep
    2. Understanding the Tableau Prep Builder Interface
    3. Flowing with the fundamental paradigm
      1. Connecting to data
      2. Cleaning the data
        1. Union, merging mismatched fields, and removing unnecessary fields
        2. Grouping and cleaning
      3. Calculations and aggregations in Tableau Prep
      4. Filtering in Tableau Prep
      5. Transforming the data for analysis
      6. Options for automating flows
    4. Summary
  19. Section 4: Advanced Techniques and Sharing with Others
  20. Advanced Visualizations, Techniques, Tips, and Tricks
    1. Advanced visualizations
      1. Slope Charts
      2. Lollipop Charts
      3. Waterfall Charts
      4. Step Lines and Jump Lines
      5. Spark Lines
      6. Dumbbell Charts
      7. Unit chart/symbol charts
      8. Marimekko Charts
    2. Sheet swapping and dynamic dashboards
      1. Dynamically showing and hiding other controls
    3. Mapping techniques
      1. Supplementing the standard in geographic data
      2. Manually assigning geographic locations
      3. Creating custom territories
        1. Ad hoc custom territories
        2. Field-defined custom territories
      4. Leveraging spatial objects
      5. Some final map tips
    4. Using background images
    5. Animation
    6. Transparency
    7. Summary
  21. Sharing Your Data Story
    1. Presenting, printing, and exporting
      1. Presenting
      2. Printing
      3. Exporting
    2. Sharing with users of Tableau Desktop or Tableau Reader
      1. Sharing with Tableau Desktop users
      2. Sharing with Tableau Reader users
    3. Sharing with users of Tableau Server, Tableau Online, and Tableau Public
      1. Publishing to Tableau Public
      2. Publishing to Tableau Server and Tableau Online
      3. Interacting with Tableau Server
      4. Additional distribution options using Tableau Server
    4. Summary
  22. Other Books You May Enjoy
    1. Leave a review - let other readers know what you think

Product information

  • Title: Learning Tableau 2019 - Third Edition
  • Author(s): Joshua N. Milligan
  • Release date: March 2019
  • Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
  • ISBN: 9781788839525