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The Data Daily

Data Visualization - how Tableau helps you combine analytics and art

Data Visualization - how Tableau helps you combine analytics and art

Presentation Guru was recently invited to a demonstration by Tableau on how to Make Your Data Make an Impact. The company and a current Tableau user, who was the main case study, gave impressive presentations and it certainly whetted our appetite to find out more. In this article Brittany Fong, Business Intelligence Analyst and Tableau wiz, offers her honest opinion of both the pros and cons of using Tableau to explore data and discover new insights.

Techtarget defines Data Visualization as “a general term that describes any effort to help people understand the significance of data by placing it in a visual context. Patterns, trends and correlations that might go undetected in text-based data can be exposed and recognized earlier with data visualization software.”

Data visualization tools today go way beyond the standard charts and graphs used in Excel spreadsheets, using more sophisticated ways including infographics, geographic maps, sparklines, heatmaps and detailed bar and pie charts.

According to a 2011 report by The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI), successful data visualization, often interactive representations of data sets, can contribute greatly to improvements in corporate business intelligence (BI) efforts and organizational productivity.

The same report goes on to outline the two main categories of data visualization technology: Visual Reporting and Visual Analysis.

Visual Reporting uses charts and graphics to depict business performance for executives and managers, usually against predefined metrics, and are often presented in a dashboard or scorecard, which give users a visual snapshot of performance.

Visual Analysis, however, enables users to visually explore data to discover new insights, empowering business analysts to explore trends and anomalies in data sets they create, and publish views for others to consume.

Achieving successful data visualization requires fresh thinking about how to present information to data management analysts and consideration needs to be given to the software you choose to aid this.

Tableau is one such application that is used to create interactive graphs and dashboards. Its mission is to help people see and understand the world’s data.

There are two types of Tableau applications: developing and sharing. Developer tools are the applications used to create visualisations and dashboards. Sharing tools are applications that allow developers to share the visualisations and dashboards with other people so they can interact and explore the data.

The developer applications run locally on your computer and offer both free and paid versions. Once you have created a visualization you will publish it to one of the sharing platforms, where you will receive a link to the visualization or embed code for your website. If you are not going to be using interactivity you can export your visualizations as a PDF or image. For more information on the different Tableau products available refer to my Outline of Tableau Products (but check the Tableau website for their up-to-date pricing).

Overall, Tableau is a really great data visualization tool and a lot better than any of its competitors. It provides the most flexibility and allows for data analysis on large data sets. It’s easy to learn the basics and makes great looking visualizations quickly.

If you’re interested in learning Tableau, they have over forty hours of free tutorial videos on their website; a community forum section for questions; and a great library of whitepapers. Of course, you can always search Google for your questions, as there are a multitude of great Tableau blogs with tutorials, examples, and workarounds. For more information on learning Tableau you can refer to my blog post, I don’t know what to do, I’m new!

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