Review

Review: Learning Tableau 2020

UWTSD Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in Applied Computing, Nik Whitehead, recommends this book that enables even the non-specialist data analyst to create high-quality visualisations.

So you’ve got a huge pile of data and you don’t really know what it all means. This is a common problem when dealing with business data nowadays - and spreadsheets just don’t cut it for data visualisation any more. You need something with a bit more oomph for exploring and presenting your data, and historically, this would have been done with a statistical package by a data analyst. But if you can get your hands on this book, then Tableau, a data visualisation application that has been a Gartner Analytics and Business Intelligence Leader for the last eight years, could become accessible to you even as a non-specialist.

The book can be approached in two ways. If you just want to learn the absolute basics and play with the software in order to learn, Chapter One will give you all of the fundamental things you need to know: how to connect to your data; how to navigate around the data and select elements for display; how to create bar charts, line graphs, and geographical displays; and how to export your graphics for use elsewhere or turn them into an interactive dashboard. The reader is led through a set of clearly-explained and well-illustrated exercises that showcase Tableau’s most basic functions and lay the groundwork for the rest of the book, which looks in greater depth at Tableau’s more complex calculation, forecasting, and presentation capabilities. If you’re interested in how to go beyond the basic graphs, the latter part of the book gives you lots of options.

The strength of this book is that while it covers the expected topics of how to produce a wide variety of visualisation types, it also provides an excellent introduction to how to use Tableau’s built-in calculation tools to take your raw data and process it to customise your visualisations. These are often ignored by introductory texts as they require a bit more computational thinking than the rest of Tableau’s highly visual interface, but the book provides plenty of detail and examples to help you go beyond the basics. For readers who really want to get up close and dirty with their data, the book’s final chapters include a section on using Tableau Prep, a new data cleaning and import tool. Cleaning and processing data can be a bit of a monster, so this chapter, while clearly for more advanced users, does make the import process less daunting.

Overall this book does a good job of explaining what is a quite complex piece of software. It’s ideal for anyone tired of having to ask someone else to provide data visualisations and would like to explore their data themselves.