0 to 1: Tableau Fundamentals (1)— Introduction to Tableau and building your first worksheet
By: Vicky Miao
Tags: Data Visualization, Businessintelligencetool, Tableau, Business Analysis, Data Analysis

1. Introduction to Tableau

Tableau is a visual analytics platform that offers various products to help its users understand and analyze data.

Main products offered by Tableau:

In this tutorial, we will focus on Tableau Desktop.

2. Getting started and connecting to data

(1) Download and install Tableau Desktop

Tableau Desktop can be downloaded from the Tableau website. You can start with a 14-day free trial if don’t have a license.

Once you have Tableau Desktop installed, open up the app (the latest version is 2020.3)

Tableau takes you to the start page after you launch the app. The start page mainly consists of the following:

data connection options

access to workbooks you used to save

sample workbooks

Tableau learning resources

start page

(2) Connect to data

The first step in creating data visualization in Tableau is to connect to your data. This tutorial will use the public data set HollywoodMostProfitableStories.csv from the resources page in Tableau Public.

The dataset contains film title, genre, studio, audience score, profitability, ratings, etc., for movies released in 2007–2012.

underlying data in CSV

Because the dataset is in the CSV file, we will connect to text file.

connect to a data source

Once connected, you will see the data grid which resembles the local CSV file. The data grid displays the first 1,000 rows of the data contained in the underlying data source. Tableau will also automatically detect and assign each filed a data type.

data grid

The data type can be string ( Abc ), numeric ( # ), boolean ( T/F ), etc. If you find the auto-assigned data type not accurate, you can change the data type by clicking on the data type icon ( Abc | # | T/F | etc.):

change data type

The data source page and the data grid are to allow you to connect and view your data. To start building visualization, we will go to the main workspace — the worksheet page.

go to worksheet

3. Learn about the interface and build your first chart

The Tableau worksheet page mainly consists of the following components:

Data pane/analytics pane

Columns and rows shelf

Marks card

Filter shelf

Toolbar

worksheet interface

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Data pane

The data fields of the underlying data sources are organized and displayed in the data pane, from which you drag the fields into the canvas to render the visualization.

A horizontal line segments the data pane; the fields above are dimension fields, below which are measure fields.

Dimension:

Implication : Tableau would treat fields that contain qualitative information as dimension fields. Dimension fields are used to segment the measure fields and give headers.

: Tableau would treat fields that contain qualitative information as dimension fields. Dimension fields are used to segment the measure fields and give headers. Data type: Normally the data type of dimension fields is string, date, boolean.

Measure:

Implication : Tableau would treat fields that contain quantitative information as measure fields. Measure fields can be measured, aggregated, and are used for mathematical operations or plotting and giving values.

: Tableau would treat fields that contain quantitative information as measure fields. Measure fields can be measured, aggregated, and are used for mathematical operations or plotting and giving values. Data type: Normally the data type of measure fields is numeric.

If you find the auto-assigned measure and dimension not desired, you can right-click on the field and choose: convert to dimension/measure .

Columns and rows shelf

The columns shelf creates columns of your chart, while the rows shelf creates rows of your charts.

If we want to build a vertical bar chart visualizing worldwide gross by films, I would drag films to column shelf (to get film titles as column headers) and worldwide gross to row shelf (to plot gross values and an axis along rows)

render a view with fields on columns and rows shelf

Marks card

Now we get a bar chart for gross by films. Notice in Tableau each data point (each bar in this case) is a mark. The marks shelf is to customize these marks.

The dropdown is to change the chart type. Based on the fields on the columns and rows shelf, Tableau automatically selects the best mark type for the data view. To change the automatic chart type, you can select the dropdown and choose another chart type.

change chart type

To change color or size, add labels, or edit tooltips of the chart, we can also utilize the Marks card.

customize marks

Filers shelf

If you want to drill down to a specific subset of data, you can use filters. For example, in our Hollywood film dataset, I only want to show films released in 2010 — 2011. I will drag the year field to the filters shelf, and limit the timeframe to 2010–2011.

add year filter

Toolbar

The toolbar is located below the menu drop-downs on the page. There are some useful buttons on the toolbar :

Sort (in descending and ascending order) | Swap columns and rows ( will swap the fields on the column and row shelf, thus the view layout) | Fit view dropdown| Clear worksheet | Undo

use toolbar

4. Save and share your work

If you are okay with the charts you’ve built and happy to share your discoveries with others, there are several options you can go with:

(1) save as local workbook

Tableau workbooks can be opened locally in Tableau Desktop or Tableau Reader. There are two formats of Tableau workbook can be saved to:

(2) export to image or data

(3) export as PowerPoint

(4) Publish to server

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