Tableau disaster recovery

Tutorial for Beginners

WHAT IS TABLEAU?

Tableau is an easy to use business intelligence software. It makes data visualization, data analytics, and reporting as easy as dragging and dropping. Anyone can learn to use Tableau without having a prior programming experience. Tableau can combine data from various data sources such as spreadsheets, databases, cloud data, and even big data- all into one program to perform dynamic analysis.

WHY TABLEAU?

Whether it’s small or large, profitable or non-profit, every organization needs to analyze their data for optimal decision making. Analyzing data has never been easier with traditional business intelligence tools.

Here are some of the advantages of using Tableau over the traditional BI tools:

Traditional Method Tableau

Requires specific programming skills No programming skills required

Focused on only one type of database Combines different types of database spreadsheets, databases, cloud data, and even big data such as Hadoop

Time consuming Time saving

Decision makers have to ask the IT people to retrieve any information from the database

Decision makers can directly use the dashboard to retrieve any information from the database

Largely depends on Query languages Query is done behind the scene

Combining different types of database is difficult

Different types of databases can be combined easily

Not every business intelligence tool offers interactive dashboard

Interactive dashboard is easy to build and it makes data visualization quick and efficient

Comparatively expensive Comparatively affordable

Mostly designed for large businesses Perfect BI solution for small, medium, and large businesses, and even for non-profits

Tableau is the next generation’s business intelligence software that brings traditional complex analytics to the end user in a desktop environment with dynamic and faster performance.

CONNECTING TO EXCEL FILE

There are many ways to connect to data as you can see on left side.

Navigate to the bottom and click on Sample-Superstore as shown here.

This is data that came with your installation of Tableau.

Now you are in the data connection window, It looks somewhat like the following-

Notice there are three sheets in this file- Orders, People, and Returns. You can simply drag

the table you want. If you drag more than one table, Tableau automatically creates the join between the tables.

CREATING CHARTS

Creating charts based on the data we connected is easy. At the bottom of the page, Click on a sheet (sheet 1) and we will see the following screen:

Tableau automatically separates the data into Dimensions and Measures. Dimensions are the categorical fields. These fields will create labels in the chart. Measures are the quantitative fields. These are the numbers we want to analyze. They create axis in the chart.

After adding Order Date, Category, and Sales, the chart looks like this:

Here I have months in the x-axis, and category and sales are in y-axis. Different color represents different years.

How do I know what type of chart to use?

Sometimes, it might be confusing what type of chart should be used for a specific data. Tableau has an interesting feature called “Show me”. “Show me” is the list of the possible charts that can be created using different combination of data.

Note: Holding down the Ctrl key and clicking any two or more combinations of dimension and measure will highlight the possible chart

in Show Me box.

Below are two more charts created from the same source of data:

This chart shows global sales and profit filtered by categoties:

This chart shows sales by category:

Adding Filters to the charts:

Adding filters to the charts enable the end user to easily drill down to obtain desired information. To add a filter, simply right click on the dimension that will be used for filter and choose “Show quick filter”.

CREATING DASHBOARD

Tableau Dashboard contains all the related features intuitively interconnected to provide interactive and real-time dashboard experience for non-technical users.

To create a dashboard, click “New Dashboard” icon at the bottom the page.

On the top left corner, dashboard pane will display the available sheets. In my case, I have sales, crosstab, global sales and profit, and sales by category. To add those sheets on the dashboard, simply drag and drop them on the empty space to the right.

Applying filter on a worksheet:

Sometimes, on a dashboard, a user may want one filter to update multiple sheets. For example, “category” filter can be used to filter all the sheets on the dashboard. To do that, click the drop down menu of the filter you want to apply. Then choose “Apply to Worksheets” and “All using this data source” as shown in the figure bellow.

This is how the final dashboard looks like after adding three sheets and applying filters: