Hello everyone, this is an introductory blog about Tableau. In this blog we will explain what is Tableau, why we use it, what are the different data sources that we can connect with, and what are the different data connection types available.

But first, let’s understand the importance of Data Analysis and Data Visualization. In today’s world every enterprise, company, or organization is collecting huge amounts of data from its users or client that can’t be used in its raw form. At that time the capability of data analysis comes into play, with the help of data analysis we can distinguish the important information from the raw data after performing certain activities such as data inspection, data cleaning and data modeling.

Data Analysis helps us to get the data that is needed to get fruitful insights but in order to make the data easily understandable and make effective decisions, the power of Data Visualization comes into play. With the help of Data Visualization, we can make complex data easily understandable to a larger audience. We can build different visuals to make the data easy to understand and Tableau is one of the best data visualization tools to create easy yet interactive visualization.

Overview

Tableau is a feature-rich and analytically powerful data visualization tool, which is being used across industries from NGOs to large-scale multinational companies to make raw data easily understandable to every person in the organization or to the customer of the company. It is easy to use Visualization tool that a non-IT person can use to create a Dashboard or report. It does not require you to have knowledge about any programming language as you can create an Insightful report or Dashboard with simple drag and drop.

Why Use It?

Tableau provides flexibility to change the data type, create your own custom field in Tableau desktop with the help of the calculated field, and create sets and parameters instead of using hardcoded values. Further, Tableau lets users create custom charts and make changes as they see fit with its dual-axis feature, which allows users to overlap their visuals and make creative changes that will help the end users easily understand complex data.

Data Sources

Tableau can connect to most of the data sources that are widely used. Users can connect to an excel workbook to most cloud-based data sources. Tableau allows users to connect to multiple data sources in order to take the benefit of data blending as and when needed if we are getting data from multiple sources. Here are some of the data sources that are supported by Tableau.
Source: idwbi.com

Tableau Connections

Tableau offers different connection types in Tableau. In Tableau there are two types of data connections Live connection and Extract connection.

Live Connection: A live connection allows you real-time or almost real-time data connection. When you create a live connection and refresh the Tableau view, it will update based on changes to the underlying data source. If your live connection is to a database, you will need to enter credentials to access the data.

Extract Connection: An extract connection essentially creates an extract of the connected data and is optimized for complex data visualization where we use multiple filters, calculations, and parameters. When you create an extract, the Tableau view will use the same underlying data unless you choose to refresh the extract. If you create an extract, your Tableau workbook will continue to work even if you are not able to connect to the original data source.

Tableau Products and Services

Tableau offers a lot of different products under the Tableau Platform, which helps from connecting different data sources to cleaning the data with Tableau Prep, further creating Interactive and insightful reports or dashboards with Tableau Desktop to sharing the reports on Tableau Online or Tableau server.

Tableau Prep: Tableau Prep helps in data cleaning, data modeling, automating the data prep workflow (If we get similar data most of the time), and creating different join types for different data sources. We can further change the data type, edit the value directly, and a lot more.

Tableau Prep

Tableau Desktop: Tableau desktop is the highest benchmark standard in data visualization. It offers an interactive interface to create Visualization from simple reports to complex yet easy-to-use dashboards for your team or organization.
Tableau Desktop

Tableau Server: Tableau server offers organizations ease of deployment, scalability, and reliability, which let organizations share the report or dashboard with the teams without worrying about data protection.
Tableau Server
Source: Tableau.com

 

Tableau Online: Tableau online is a cloud-hosted analytics platform, where you can publish your dashboards or reports to share them with other users. Tableau online takes away the hassle to configure servers and manage software or hardware upgrades.

Tableau Online
Source: Tableau.com

 

Tableau Mobile: Tableau mobile lets us access the dashboard at any time and anywhere. Tableau automatically creates optimized dashboard layouts for mobiles.
Tableau Mobile
Source: Tableau.com

I hope that this blog about Introduction to Tableau helps you to have an understanding of Tableau, why to use it and which data sources to connect with it, different products offered by Tableau, and what these products are used to create Visualization and share it with your team or customer. In the upcoming blogs we will come up with Joins, Filters, and practical implementation in Tableau, so stay tuned.

Amlgo Labs is an advanced data analytics and decision sciences company based out in Gurgaon and Bangalore, India. We help our clients in different areas of data solutions including the design/development of end-to-end solutions (Cloud, Big Data, UI/UX, Data Engineering, Advanced Analytics, and Data Sciences) with a focus on improving businesses and providing insights to make intelligent data-driven decisions across verticals. We have another vertical of business that we call – Financial Regulatory Reporting for (MAS, APRA, HKMA, EBA, FED, RBI, etc) all major regulators in the world and our team is specialized in commonly used regulatory tools across the globe (AxiomSL Controller ViewOneSumX DevelopmentMoody’s RiskIBM Open Pages, etc). We build innovative concepts and then solutions to give an extra edge to the business outcomes and help to visualize and execute effective decision strategies. We are among the top 10 Data Analytics Start-ups in India, in 2019 and 2020.
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