The Authoring interface—named as such because you are authoring an analysis or story with your data—is the main place where you create visualizations in Tableau Desktop. In order to make progress, becoming acquainted with the various features of the Authoring interface is critical.
Data Pane
Under the top navigation menu and tool ribbon, you’ll see the starting point for every view on the left side of the Authoring interface: the Data pane (Figure 4-1).
The first thing you’ll see on the Data pane are all the data sources you have connected to. We have connected to only one data source so far, so we see Orders+ (the plus sign indicating we have connected to the Orders table and at least one additional table) from the Sample – Superstore Excel file. Farther down on the Data pane, you see all the fields available to analyze.
Figure 4-1. The Data pane in Tableau’s Authoring interface
Fields
By default, the fields in our data source are organized into the respective tables they came from. If you prefer to organize your fields by folders, you can click the down arrow in the top-right corner of the Data pane and choose Group by Folder, as shown in Figure 4-2.
Figure 4-2. Grouping data fields by folder in Tableau Desktop
In addition to the fields you ...
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