1. Introduction
Welcome to this introductory course on Tableau! My name is Maarten and I will be your first instructor guiding you through your Tableau journey.
2. What is Tableau?
Tableau is a powerful and leading data visualization tool. It allows you to intuitively click, drag, and drop data elements to explore and interrogate your data.
In other words: Tableau makes it easy to build beautiful, interactive visualizations from raw data.
3. Why use Tableau?
While Tableau is designed to be used by a range of business users and non-technical audiences, it also provides access to a deep computational ability for advanced data analytics.
It's flexible because you can easily work with a lot of different data sources.
In addition, Tableau is quite intuitive: visual cues and icons make the interface easier to navigate.
Also, the drag and drop functionality makes prototyping very fast: you can build dashboards in hours or days instead of weeks.
Overall, Tableau is great because you can frame the business question you want to answer, import and clean data, analyze and visualize data, make business decisions, and finally, present insights, all within one tool!
4. Who uses Tableau?
Tableau enables anyone to ask questions about their data. If you search for "Tableau" on job boards, the most common job titles you'll see are variants of data analyst, business analyst, and analytics consultant. Basically anyone who wants to analyze or visualize data can benefit from using Tableau.
Let's look at some examples of what's possible with Tableau.
5. Possibilities with Tableau
Presenting sales performance over time and location using an interactive dashboard is a very common example for using Tableau. The user can select, filter, and hover over the various dashboard elements to learn more about the data.
6. Possibilities with Tableau
Secondly, Tableau is also a fantastic tool to present the results of your competitive analysis.
7. Possibilities with Tableau
Thirdly, Tableau can also be used to track outbreaks and epidemic progression, like the coronavirus.
Factual data is convincing, and visualization is an incredibly efficient way to get your point across - so Tableau can be an appropriate tool in various circumstances.
8. Tableau versions
Before we head over to the exercises, let's quickly talk about Tableau versions.
This course will teach you how to use Tableau Desktop, which consists of two variants.
Tableau Desktop Public Edition is essentially a free version of Tableau. It has most of the software features: you have access to all the available visualizations and you can connect to Excel, CSV files, Google Sheets, and some other web data sources. While your are limited to load a maximum of 15 million rows, you can save your work both locally or publish online.
9. Tableau versions
The paid version requires a license and features the same visualizations, but you can connect to all available data sources, with an unlimited amount of rows. Saving your work is possible both locally and online.
In this course, you will be using the public edition of Tableau. Although you can download Tableau Public on your local machine if you want to, you don't have to install anything to complete this course. Everything, including a virtual machine running Tableau, and all of the necessary datasets, are available for you directly in your browser.
10. Let's practice!
Got it? Let's see how well you know Tableau.