Tableau Training, Desktop Specialist, Global Certification, Online Training

This article today is going to help you to easily get transitive with the GUI of Tableau. Without beating around the bushes, I’ll take you to the itinerary. To get the desired results, there are three elementary steps that you will go through to generate any report. Below are the steps to create basic visualization:-

Connect to a data source- this is a prerequisite for any further action wherein, we locate the data by using appropriate connection according to the datatype.
Choose dimensions and measures- This involves selecting only those variables which are actually required in our analysis.
Apply visualization technique – After the selection of variables, we use visualization techniques depending upon the need of the moment and characteristics of the data.

To get a better understanding of it, we’ll use “sample – superstore.xls”, it is the dataset that comes by default on tableau installation. Go to the installation folder of tableau and reach out to my tableau repository wherein you’ll find this inbuilt database

Connect to a data source

Once you open tableau by clicking tableau icon, you’ll land up to the start page displaying a range full of data sources. Under the header connect you have various ways to connect to servers, files and, tableau server. You can simply select sample superstore.xls from saved data sources in the header ‘connect’. It’s an excel file with .xls extension, with three different spreadsheets in it namely, Orders, people, Returns.

We’ll drag orders on the “Drag sheets here” region. Doing this will show all the columns in the dataset on the screen. # signifies numeric column, ‘Abc’ shows it to be a string and, shows that the column contains geographical locations in it. By default, tableau shows 1,000 rows or the number of rows in data source whichever is less. We can see all the rows by increasing the number in the assigned section(Red circled).

Choose the dimensions and measures.

As you can see in the picture above, I’ve dragged sheet orders for the analysis. Now coming on to sheet 1, we will choose the data to be analyzed by deciding on the dimensions and measures. Dimensions are descriptive however measures are numeric variables. When these variables are put together on-axis the visual will represent the performance of the categorical variables on the basis of continuous or ordinal measure variable. Choose category and region as dimensions and sales as the measure.

Applying Visualization Technique

As it’s evident above that date is available in tabular form. To get better insights we need to calculate the number of values before coming to any decision. Voila! Here we can see them on different charts, maps and, graphs.

Colors help in making the figure more comprehensive and attractive. I simply dragged region(Dimension) into color in marks section. Also, to make the chart more attractive I’ve just transposed the columns using the transpose button on the toolbar. Just by taking these 2 simple steps, my vision has become more catchy and easy to read.

The chart shown in the section above is exemplary we can use a number of other Dimensions and, Measures in a logical manner to mine hidden solutions to unattended problems. In the image above it is visible that orange and grey bars are the leading ones means south and west are better performers. It actually becomes easy for a decision-maker to come to a solution if, it takes less effort to get information from the data.