Data Visualization: An Exploration of Tableau's Capabilities
What is Tableau and it's capabilities?
Tableau stands out as a prominent and highly sought-after business intelligence (BI) tool that empowers users to visualize and analyze their data in a visually engaging and easily understandable format.
With Tableau, you can seamlessly work with live data sets, freeing up valuable time that would otherwise be spent on laborious data wrangling tasks.
While this provided a brief overview of Tableau, let's delve deeper and explore what exactly Tableau entails.
Data Visualization with Tableau
Tableau Certification Training is one of the most sought-after skills in Data Visualization. In this part of the blog-series “What is Tableau?”, I will explain to you what exactly is tableau and how to work on it, thereby showcasing you the real power of data visualization using Tableau.
Power Of Data Visualization: Anscombe's Quartet
This example of Anscombe’s Quartet will show you the Power of Data Visualization.
Now you would ask “ what is Anscombe’s quartet? ”
Well, Anscombe’s quartet comprises four datasets that have nearly identical simple
descriptive statistics, yet appear very different when graphed. Each dataset
consists of eleven (x,y) points.
In the below image, you will notice that the data points in each dataset is very
similar, but when you create a graph for the same, each dataset comes up with its
own visualization.
But Why Tableau?
Tableau easily connects to nearly any data source, be it corporate Data Warehouse,
Microsoft Excel or web-based data
Use Tableau and get connected to different data sources from files and servers. You can work on various file formats like CSV, JSON, TXT or even get your data imported from servers like Tableau Server, MySQL, Amazon Redshift & many more.
Find out our Tableau Training Course in Top Cities
Since we have established connection with Tableau, now its turn to understand
Tableau’s UI and see how fields from the Measures and Dimension
(under the Data Pane) play an important role in creating visualization.
You will also learn about Page Shelf, Filter Shelf and Marks Card.
Understanding Tableau's UI and its Terminologies
Measure
Measures are the fields which can be measured, aggregated or used for different calculation purpose. It helps you to answer your business-related questions. Generally, a field containing a numeric value is placed under the measure.
Ex: Discount, Profit, Sales, etc
Dimension
The dimension consists of those values which cannot be aggregated. It is used for categorizing facts.
Ex: Category, Country, City, etc
Page Shelf
Page Shelf allows you to analyze your data based on the individual values
contained within a field. It creates a set of pages, with a different view on each page.
Filter Shelf
Filter Shelf allows you to add or remove data from your view. You can add
Dimensions and Measures from the data pane to filter shelf to filter your data.
Once filtered the fields will be displayed on the Filter Shelf.
Row/Column Shelf
Use Row and Column Shelf to add dimension and measure to complete the
visualization. Row is treated as the X-Axis and Column as Y-Axis.
Marks Card Shelf
Mark Shelf is a region in Tableau where you can drag your fields to set mark properties.It helps you in enhancing visualization by setting colour, size, label, detail, path or shapes.
Creating Visualization with Tableau
I guess by now you are well versed with Tableau’s Terminologies. Lets move ahead
and explore some of the visualization which you can easily create in Tableau.
Following is an interactive visualization where you can explore the
different types of graphs including: Bar Chart, Heat Map,
Scatter Plot, Packed Bubble and few others.
I hope you got a fair idea of “What is Tableau?”
