Intorduction to Tableau

What is Tableau:

Tableau is a software company that produces interactive data visualization products focused on business intelligence. It is very helpful in simplifying raw data into very easily understandable format. Data analysis is very fast with Tableau and the visualizations created are in the form of dashboards and worksheets.You don’t need any coding knowledge to work with Tableau. It is very useful in drilling-down data, creating insightful reports and garner actionable business insights.


Business intelligence and Data Visualization:

Before going into depth of tableau we have to understand what exactly mean by "Business intelligence and Data Visualization"?

For the growth of any organization Smart, strategic and real time decision making is a must and a very crucial factor. In the early days that was done by revising and analyzing documented reports comprising all the data but in the recent years data visualization became popular. It made the whole decision making process more efficient and better by helping understand the data better, grasp concepts and identify patterns.

Wondering how? Here’s how, it changed the way we see and understand the data. Visualizing the data in pictorial or graphical form increases the productivity. I mean, it’s pretty clear that using charts, graphs or images to visualize and study the data is easier and interesting than just poring over the reports and spreadsheets again and again.

Coming to the business Intelligence part, let’s understand what role Tableau plays in it and how tableau has taken over the world of business intelligence.

Decisive Factor	How Tableau Wins?
Technical Knowledge	No need for any prior technical knowledge in order to use tableau.
Connecting to data sources	Tableau connects to all kinds of data sources, be it MS Excel, data warehouses or web data etc.
Speed	Coming up with interactive, visual data presentation in mere seconds rather than months or years.
Data Visualization	Highly evolved data visualization provides number of ways in which data can be studied to benefit and empower the businesses’ growth.
Gaining insights	It generates visually engaging business insights.
Ease of use	Tableau is a simple drag and drop interface which makes it easy to learn and operate.

Tableau business intelligence and data visualization tool has been placed in the leader’s quadrant for the fifth year in a row in 2017 in the Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms by IT research firm Gartner. Gartner has positioned Tableau as highest in ability to execute again this year. When it comes to the aspects of intuitive analytics and interactive visual analytics it cannot get any better than Tableau.

Different Product by Tableau:

Tableau Desktop:

Tableau Desktop is a data visualization tool that helps us get actionable insights about data fast. It differs from Tableau Server in that it provides users with the ability to develop comprehensive, interactive workbooks and dashboards to full fill their academic or business requirement Called “the gold standard” in visual analytics, Tableau Desktop upended the business intelligence industry and ushered in a new paradigm of self-service insight.

Tableau Prep:

Tableau Prep is a personal data preparation tool that empowers the user with the ability to cleanse, aggregate, merge or otherwise prepare their data for analysis in Tableau. Tableau Prep empowers more people to get to analysis faster by helping them quickly and confidently combine, shape, and clean their data.

Tableau Online:

Tableau Online is your analytics platform fully hosted in the cloud. Publish dashboards and share your discoveries with anyone. Invite colleagues or customers to explore hidden opportunities with interactive visualizations and accurate data. All easily accessible from a browser or on the go with our mobile apps.

Tableau Server:

Share your data and dashboards to multiply your impact. Whether you keep your Server deployment on-prem or deploy to the public cloud you can keep the management of your server.

Tableau Public:  

Tableau Public is free software that can allow anyone to connect to a spreadsheet or file and create interactive data visualizations for the web. Bloggers are starting conversations about topics from global health to policy to sports. By adding data to the conversation, bloggers can bring a new perspective to a topic. Tableau Public lets bloggers publish data visualizations on any topic, and make them interactive so readers can dig in.

Advantages of using Tableau:

·        Fantastic Visualizations:

It is one of the greatest strengths of Tableau. You can work with a lot of data that does not have a seeming order to it and create a range of visualizations thanks to the in-built features of Tableau. It helps you create visualizations that stand out of the crowd. You also have the option of switching between different visualizations in order to bring about a greater context, ways of drilling down data and exploring the data at a very minute level.

·        In-depth Insights :

Businesses need insights and they need it now. Tableau can help forward-thinking in enterprises to analyze the data without any specific goals in mind. You can explore the visualizations and look at the same data from different angles. You can frame ‘what if’ queries and work with data by hypothetically visualizing data in different manner and dynamically adding components for comparison and analysis. When you are working with real-time data then these capabilities are accentuated in a very big manner.

·        User-friendly approach :

This is one of the greatest strengths of Tableau. It is built from the ground up for people who do not have any technical skills or coding experience for that matter. So everything can be done by anybody without any prior set of skills. Since most of the features are drag-and-drop, each visualization is so intuitive and self-depicting. Tableau today is no doubt one of the best visualization and analytics tool in the market.

·        Working with disparate data sources:

Tableau has a powerful reason to be included by various organizations in today’s data-driven world where data can come from any point and disparate sources. This is where Tableau has an edge over other business intelligence and analytics tools. Tableau lets you work by connecting to various data sources, data warehouses, files which exist in the cloud, big data, data that exists in spreadsheets, non-relational data among other types of data. Tableau effortlessly blends all the different types of data to help organizations come up with compelling visualizations.

·        Adding data sets:

Be it some database or Excel workbook, with tableau one can easily add new data sets which get automatically blended with tableau using common fields.

·        Switching between visualizations:

You also have the option of switching between different visualizations in order to bring about a greater context, ways of drilling down data and exploring the data at a very minute level

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• Overview
• Step 1: Connect to your data
• Step 2: Drag and drop to take a first look
• Step 3: Focus your results
• Step 4: Explore your data geographically
• Step 5: Drill down into the details
• Step 6: Build a dashboard to show your insights
• Step 7: Build a story to present
• Step 8: Share your findings with others