Learning Tableau 2022 Fifth Edition Create effective data visualizations, build interactive visual analytics, and improve your data storytelling capabilities Joshua N. Milligan BIRMINGHAM—MUMBAI Learning Tableau 2022 Fifth Edition Copyright © 2022 Packt Publishing All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews. Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented.
However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author nor Packt Publishing or its dealers and distributors, will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to have been caused directly or indirectly by this book. Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
Senior Publishing Product Manager: Devika Battike Acquisition Editor – Peer Reviews: Saby Dsilva Project Editor: Parvathy Nair Content Development Editor: Edward Doxey Copy Editor: Safis Editing Technical Editor: Karan Sonawane Proofreader: Safis Editing Indexer: Hemangini Bari Presentation Designer: Rajesh Shirsath First published: April 2015 Second edition: September 2016 Third edition: March 2019 Fourth edition: August 2020 Fifth edition: August 2022 Production reference: 1220822 Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. Livery Place 35 Livery Street Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.com Forewords Tableau’s long-established company mission has been to help people see and understand data. That mission has changed how people work and how decisions are made. The utility of technology is in large part made possible by the community of Tableau enthusiasts that make data dreams into a reality, and Joshua Milligan’s impact on the community is rivaled by few.
As testament to that, he was recently inducted into the Tableau Visionary Hall of Fame for his contributions to the Tableau community as a thought leader, teacher, and author; this book is another outstanding addition. As leaders in the business intelligence space for over a decade (as named in the Gartner Magic Quadrant), Tableau has grown from a visualization tool to an analytical platform helping organizations of all sizes make data-driven decisions. Tableau continues to win the hearts of analysts due to its vast connectivity options and the endless ways you can explore your data. With Tableau, anyone can create beautiful, interactive visualizations to tell a story with data.
For those looking to get started with Tableau or take their skills to new heights, Milligan’s Learning Tableau 2022 is a great place to start unlocking the unlimited potential of data. As an expert in his field, Milligan has honed his skills and demonstrated them at the highest level (check out his Tableau Public page!), and this fifth edition captures his recipe for Tableau mastery. Having worked with Tableau users for the better half of a decade myself, I appreciate how this book focuses on how and why to visualize data the right way. For anyone looking to use data to make decisions, this book is a must-have in your arsenal.
– Blair Hutchinson, Senior Product Manager, Tableau, a Salesforce Company Data has been called the new oil. However, I agree with David McCandless, author of Information is Beautiful, when he claims that data is instead the new soil. Information is the fertile medium in which businesses can build their customer base, empower their people, and improve our society. Rich fruit can spring up from this marvellous loam—a harvest of insights, efficiency, intelligence, equality, and prosperity.
Truly, the soil of data can yield crops that can transform the world in which we live and work. Therefore, those who would cultivate this rich and fertile ground must be equipped with the very best of tools—technology that will enable business users and data specialists to understand, interpret and action the data that can so easily be underutilized. Tableau is such a tool. However, even the best of tools is completely useless without skilled professionals who can use it to its full potential—and such data champions are not as common as we would wish.
We suffer from an undersupply of capable Tableau users and gurus, and there is no easy answer to this challenge. In his exemplary work, Learning Tableau 2022, Joshua Milligan seeks to alleviate this famine of talent, and I believe that he has done a marvellous job of doing so. This book strikes a delicate balance between succinctness and completeness (no mean feat!), and provides you with a thorough, readable, and practical guide to learning Tableau. Joshua makes learning Tableau a progressive, enjoyable experience, and for that he deserves our applause.
Learning Tableau 2022 will get you up and running with Tableau in next to no time, enabling you to quickly experience the power and versatility of the world’s leading data visualization platform. You will then progress from simple visualizations to building advanced analytics using multiple data sources, and more, all while learning from Joshua’s real-world experience. I am very excited about this book, and I highly recommend it to any new or existing Tableau customer looking to transform their business with data. - Mark Tossell, Lead Solution Engineer, Tableau, a Salesforce Company Every digital transformation is a data transformation.
Data is at the heart of our businesses and lives—in 2021 alone it’s estimated the world produced 79 zettabytes of data, and this number is growing every year. The problem, then, isn’t gathering data. It’s understanding how to make sense of and extract insights from data, making it usable in decision-making processes. This is the role of Tableau, a solution that can completely change the way companies analyze data and make decisions.
Since 2019 Tableau has been part of Salesforce’s Customer 360 application suite. Every one of those applications is built upon, and generates, amazing amounts of data showing how to interact with your customers. Tableau brings the ability to analyze and act on this amount of data in a well-governed scalable way. During the last Tableau Conference, we announced key enhancements to simplify and democratize information access.
To mention just a few of them: we introduced Tableau Cloud, a new premier analytics experience, the next generation of Tableau Online. This is the fastest way for customers to get the full value of Tableau at enterprise scale. We announced the Tableau Accelerators (for specific business roles and industries use cases), ready-to-use fully customizable templates that help organizations get insights and value from their data fast. We introduced Data Stories, a powerful data storytelling feature in Tableau that makes it easy for anyone to understand data, democratizing access to data insights for every role in an organization.
These are just a few examples, and it is just the beginning of our amazing journey! Later in 2022 we will release new AI-driven functionalities like Model Builder, a new way to leverage the power of Salesforce’s Einstein and develop linear and tree-based machine learning models directly in Tableau. The list of technical capabilities may be infinite, but we cannot provide full value to our customers with technology alone; we need to help the organization to become data-driven. However, becoming a data-driven organization is not just a matter of product functionalities, it’s a matter of data culture and skills. With this in mind, there is another topic that I would love to bring to your attention: data literacy.
Data literacy is an ability to explore, understand, and communicate with data. It includes critical thinking skills to use, interpret, and make decisions with data, then convey its significance and value to others. Improving this ability is the only way to unlock the power of data and optimize your investments on technology. In line with this belief, I love the work done by Joshua N.
Milligan in his new book. It’s a well-designed book with a very good flow and step-by-step examples, that doesn’t require pre-existing industry knowledge. After reading this book you will have gained a good understanding of Tableau, and you will be ready to delve deeper into more specific topics and new functionalities. If you’re reading this foreword, you’re on the right path to learning a market leader solution that will provide massive value to you and your organisation.
Enjoy the reading and if you want to connect with me, feel free to reach me out on LinkedIn. - Roberto Andreoli, Senior Director Solution Engineering Tableau, South EMEA, Salesforce Contributors About the author Joshua N. Milligan has been recognized as a Tableau Visionary (formerly Zen Master) every year since 2014 and is now in the Tableau Hall of Fame. This is the highest honor bestowed by Tableau, recognizing technical mastery and service to the community.
He is also a global Iron Viz finalist. Since 2004, Joshua has been a consultant at Teknion Data Solutions until acquisition by Resultant in 2022, where he continues to serve clients in numerous industries. He is the author of every edition of Learning Tableau and resides in Tulsa with his wife and four children. I am extremely grateful for those who have shaped my journey.
My father, Stuart, introduced me to computers. My colleagues challenge me to grow every day. The Tableau DataFam provides a wealth of ideas, inspiration, and a place to share. I am especially thankful for my wife, Kara, who has encouraged me and loved me every step of the way! About the reviewers Born and raised in Germany, Marleen Meier moved to Amsterdam after graduating from University with a masters’ degree in Mathematics and Sport Science.
She worked as a data analyst and later on as a quantitative risk analyst before eventually moving to Chicago, US, where she now works in the risk analytics space. Since 2018, Marleen has worked with Packt, and has published Mastering Tableau 2019 as well as Mastering Tableau 2021. Candra Mcrae is a Lead Solutions Engineer at Tableau, and an experienced analytics leader helping companies identify opportunities, execute, and scale by putting their data to work for them. She is also a previous #TC18 speaker, former featured author, a featured speaker with The Maple Square, and mentor.
When she is not showing others how to understand their data or how to tell data stories that inspire action, she enjoys moving the conversation forward related to diversity in tech and data ethics. Outside of her day job, she is a proud wife and mother of one, experimental baker, music lover, and avid traveler. Join our community on Discord Join our community’s Discord space for discussions with the author and other readers: https://packt.link/ips2H Contents Preface Who this book is for What this book covers To get the most out of this book Get in touch 1. Taking Off with Tableau Foundations for building visualizations Measures and dimensions Discrete and continuous fields Discrete fields Continuous fields Visualizing data Bar charts Line charts Iterations of line charts for deeper analysis Geographic visualizations Filled maps Symbol maps Density maps Using Show Me Putting everything together in a dashboard The dashboard interface Building your dashboard Summary 2.
Connecting to Data in Tableau The Tableau paradigm The Tableau paradigm in action Connecting to data Connecting to data in a file Connecting to data on a server Connecting to data in the cloud Shortcuts for connecting to data Managing data source metadata Working with extracts instead of live connections Creating extracts Using extracts Performance Portability and security When to use an extract Using sets and groups Filtering data Filtering discrete (blue) fields Filtering continuous (green) fields Filtering dates Other filtering options Tableau Order of Operations Summary 3.
