Learning Tableau 2020: Create effective data visualizations, build interactive visual analytics, and transform your organization, 4th Edition

667 Pages·2020·23.915 MB·English

by  Joshua N. Milligan

Learning Tableau 2020
Fourth Edition
Create effective data visualizations, build interactive
visual analytics, and transform your organization
Joshua N. Milligan
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Learning Tableau 2020
Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2020 Packt Publishing
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Producer: Tushar Gupta
Acquisition Editor – Peer Reviews: Suresh Jain
Content Development Editor: Edward Doxey
Technical Editor: Karan Sonawane
Project Editor: Carol Lewis
Copy Editor: Safis Editing
Proofreader: Safis Editing
Indexer: Manju Arasan
Presentation Designer: Sandip Tadge
First published: April 2015
Second edition: September 2016
Third edition: March 2019
Fourth edition: August 2020
Production reference: 1250820
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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ISBN 978-1-80020-036-4
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Contributors
About the author
Joshua N. Milligan is a five-time Hall of Fame Tableau Zen Master. His
passion is mentoring and helping people gain insights from their data using
Tableau and Tableau Prep. As principal consultant at Teknion Data
Solutions he has served clients in numerous industries since 2004 with
expertise in software development, data modeling, and visual analytics.
Joshua has technically reviewed several Packt titles and authored each
edition of Learning Tableau. He lives with his wife and four children in
Tulsa.
Thank you first to all the wonderful individuals at Packt: Carol Lewis,
Edward Doxey, and others who edited, reviewed, published, and publicized!
Special thanks to Chris Love, Tableau Zen Master, who pointed out errors
and areas needing clarity. Finally, thank you to my wife, Kara, who has
supported me through this project as well as all of life!
About the reviewer
Chris Love is a Tableau and Alteryx expert working out of Nottingham,
United Kingdom, where he works for Tableau Gold Partner, The
Information Lab. Chris's experience in business information and analytics
spans 20 years and he has been recognized as a Tableau Zen Master for 5
years, most recently in 2020. While we get to see his mastery in his work on
Tableau Public, we also appreciate his focus on helping people who are new
to Tableau, or those who just need to do the simplest thing possible to bring
change in their organization. He uses his expertise to promote simplicity,
not just advanced uses of Tableau.
Contents
Preface
Who this book is for
What this book covers
To get the most out of this book
Download the example code files
Download the color images
Conventions used
Get in touch
Reviews
1. Taking Off with Tableau
Connecting to data
Foundations for building visualizations
Measures and dimensions
Discrete and continuous fields
Discrete fields
Continuous fields
Visualizing data
Bar charts
Iterations of bar charts for deeper analysis
Line charts
Iterations of line charts for deeper analysis
Geographic visualizations
Filled maps
Symbol maps
Density maps
Using Show Me
Putting everything together in a dashboard
The dashboard interface
Building your dashboard
Summary
2. Connecting to Data in Tableau
The Tableau paradigm
A simple example
Connecting to data
Connecting to data in a file
Connecting to data on a server
Using extracts
Connecting to data in the cloud
Shortcuts for connecting to data
Managing data source metadata
Working with extracts instead of live connections
Creating extracts
Performance
Portability and security
When to use an extract
Filtering data
Filtering discrete (blue) fields
Filtering continuous (green) fields
Filtering dates
Other filtering options
Summary
3. Moving Beyond Basic Visualizations
Comparing values
Bar charts
Bar chart variations
Bullet chart
Bar-in-bar chart
Highlighting categories of interest
Visualizing dates and times
Date parts, date values, and exact dates
Variations of date and time visualizations
Gantt charts
Relating parts of the data to the whole
Stacked bars
Treemaps
Area charts
Pie charts
Visualizing distributions
Circle charts
Jittering
Box and whisker plots