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Tableau 10 Business Intelligence Cookbook

By : Donabel Santos, Paul Banoub

3.8 (5)

Tableau 10 Business Intelligence Cookbook

3.8 (5)

By: Donabel Santos, Paul Banoub

Overview of this book

Tableau is a software tool that can speed up data analysis through its rich visualization capabilities, and help uncover insights for better and smarter decision making. This book is for the business, technology, data and analytics professionals who use and analyze data and data-driven approaches to support business operations and strategic initiatives in their organizations. This book provides easy-to-follow recipes to get the reader up and running with Tableau 10, and covers basic to advanced use cases and scenarios. The book starts with building basic charts in Tableau and moves on to building more complex charts by incorporating different Tableau features and interactivity components. There is an entire chapter dedicated to dashboard techniques and best practices. A number of recipes specifically for geospatial visualization, analytics, and data preparation are also covered. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained confidence and competence to analyze and communicate data and insights more efficiently and effectively by creating compelling interactive charts, dashboards, and stories in Tableau.

Preface

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Sections

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Free Chapter

1. Basic Charts

1. Basic Charts

Introduction

Creating a bar chart

Creating a stacked bar chart

Creating a line chart

Creating a scatter plot

Creating a heat map

Creating a text table (crosstab)

Creating a highlight table

Creating an area chart

Creating a pie chart

Creating a bubble chart

Creating a word cloud

Creating a tree map

2. Advanced Charts

2. Advanced Charts

Introduction

Creating a histogram

Creating a small multiple chart

Creating a shared axis chart

Creating a combo chart (dual axis chart)

Creating a bullet chart

Creating a bar in bar chart

Creating a donut chart

Creating a unit chart

Creating a box and whisker chart

Creating a sparkline with indicators

Creating a KPI text table

Creating a waterfall chart

Creating a population pyramid

3. Interactivity

3. Interactivity

Introduction

Creating a motion chart

Creating a dynamic column/row trellis chart

Creating a top/bottom N filter

Comparing one to everything else

Dynamically displaying dimensions

Dynamically displaying and sorting measures

Creating a custom date period filter

4. Dashboards and Story Points

4. Dashboards and Story Points

Introduction

Creating a filter action

Creating a highlight action

Creating a URL action

Creating an Infographic-like dashboard

Creating story points

5. Maps and Geospatial Visualization

5. Maps and Geospatial Visualization

Introduction

Adding data layers to map

Creating custom territories

Working with Web Map Service (WMS)

Using path to display movement in map

Mapping custom polygons

Importing custom geocoding

Using a custom image background

6. Analytics

6. Analytics

Introduction

Adding a constant line

Adding a trend line

Using a reference line

Adding a reference band

Performing cluster analysis

Visualizing forecast

Performing linear regression with R

7. Data Preparation

7. Data Preparation

Introduction

Using the Data Interpreter and pivot

Using the legacy Jet driver

Using schema.ini to resolve data type issues

Pivoting columns

Using union

Using join

Using blend

A. Calculated Fields Primer

A. Calculated Fields Primer

Different ways to create calculated fields

Calculated field window

Functions in Tableau

Function syntax

Word of caution

Different types of calculated fields

Dealing with NULLs

Tidbits

Conclusion

B. Resources

B. Resources

Data sources for recipes in this book

Articles and white papers

Blogs and additional resources

Index

Index

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Word of caution

Although some of the functions supported in Tableau have the same name as the functions you use in other applications or languages (SQL, for example), I caution you against assuming that it works the same way. There are functions that have the same name but will require different arguments, or return a different type, or both.

One example is the ISNULL function. In Tableau, the syntax of ISNULL is as follows:

ISNULL(expression)

This function in Tableau accepts a single argument and returns a Boolean value.

Transact-SQL (or T-SQL) has a similar function. However, the syntax in T-SQL is as follows:

ISNULL(check_expression, replacement_value)

In T-SQL, this function accepts two arguments and replaces the expression value if it is null. The return type is not a Boolean value. The function returns the same return type as the check_expression argument.

Support for regular expressions was introduced in Tableau V9. Regular expressions allow searching through patterns. This is quite powerful...

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