Tableau Desktop Cookbook

Preface

About six years ago, I was asked to produce a visualization based on data from Microsoft Excel, using software called Tableau. I’ll admit I fumbled around a little bit at first. When I had finished creating the visual analysis, I presented that back to stakeholders, and I saw their faces light up. For them, seeing their data in this new visualization enabled them to ask more questions and act on the data they were seeing. Since that light bulb moment, I saw the power of data visualization and wanted to empower others to work with data. But what is data?

What Is Data?

Data is all around us. Data is facts and statistics that are collected about something. That could be anything—sales, health and fitness, housing, or flights. Each one of those areas collects data. Data can be stored in many forms, from Excel spreadsheets to databases, and each organization will have a different storage process and many types of data. Without data, we can’t create data visualizations. “But what is data visualization?” I hear you ask.

An Introduction to Data Visualization

Data visualization is the visual representation of data points to communicate the messages within your data set more effectively to your audience. Data visualization enables your user to see and understand their data, ask further questions that they couldn’t before, and make data-informed decisions from these visualizations.

When there is visual representation of data, like a chart, we can quickly gain insight and spot ...