Tableau tour for beginners (Around Tableau dashboard in a few minutes-Intro tutorials)

Tableau is a data visualization platform that makes the business presentations attractive and effective. It focuses on business intelligence and impresses the audience by the way it presents the data along with making the analysis much easier. It has gained popularity in the last few years because of the flexibility and the beautiful visualization it provides, making the task of preparing impressive business presentations easier than others. Simplifying raw data in an easily understandable format and availing some of the extremely useful features, Tableau is indeed a powerful and most convenient end to end analytics platform.

How is Tableau dashboard a part of the smart business solution?

Visualization is considered to be an effective way to analyze data for any kind of business process. Tableau dashboards present data in such a way that the interpretation becomes seamless, be it sales, returns, purchase orders, warehouse operation or customer shopping behavior. It is always better to have something assisting in updating the company’s KPI (Key Performance Indicators) on a daily basis and present them on the interactive dashboard that can be viewed on a variety of devices. Tableau dashboards are really the ones that one should look up to for organizing the key information related to a business in a smart and simplified way. There are many types of dashboards offered by Tableau, and you need to choose accordingly. It also offers to note down the questions or answers raised in the meeting in real-time, which otherwise might become difficult with paper copies.

What are the things you need to look at while designing a Tableau dashboard?

The most important thing you should consider while designing is who will use it and what will be the frequency of usage. As the dashboards are applicable for various uses, thus it should be designed in a different way for each user situation. Hence the purpose and frequency should be known before you begin to design it.

The topic should be clearly defined so that it becomes easier for further processing. The stakeholders, i.e. the director, sales manager, CEO, business analyst, buyer, etc should be able to conclude things by just looking at them. They should be able to tell what kind of business queries are needed to be answered and what decisions will be made on the basis of the dashboard.

An essential thing to get started with the Tableau dashboard is to ensure you have the necessary data. You must have all the necessary data which is essential to answer the specified questions. There are several aspects of the data that you should check out, i.e. how frequently you will get it, in which form you will get (in loose files or in a database), quality of data, etc. Also, the data should be checked for errors, and if any issues are found, then the data should be evaluated before promising the delivery date to the authorities.

While designing, the presentation should be kept in mind, and it should be created from top to bottom, as it is the best option. It should be going from left to right as if you are reading some book that starts from the top left to the right bottom.

Tableau offers the option of creating maps and bar charts that can be used in the dashboard settings. Maps are useful as they assist in visualizing data with respect to the geographical component and compare the value across that region. For example, which country the company’s product has shipped to? A map view of sales by the country could be helpful in future evaluations. Bar charts are used to visualize data on the basis of performance. It could help to make data comparisons across different categories.

After categorizing data, a dashboard can be finally assembled in Tableau. The categorized data on various charts now can be put onto the dashboard and rearranged if required. Also, there are some additional actions you need to perform on the dashboard to make the most out of it. An example of one action is that just a click on the country will show both the categories of the various products and the list of individual products sold.

Tableau provides the most interactive dashboards, which is the reason why it is being used worldwide. Complex analysis can be made simpler by using such dashboards. Experts often tend to design a simple Tableau dashboard that offers great benefits. Sound knowledge, experience, and skills are something that makes a Tableau professional stay in demand. Practicing such an innovative and smart tool could be a great career path to consider.