VIDEO: Tableau Demo

tableau is a data visualization tool that lets users create visualizations and dashboards and share them with colleagues if you're looking for a business intelligence solution you'll want to consider tableau but if you're not sure where to start use our product selection tool to get a free short list of bi software recommendations click the link in the description below to get started tableau is a business intelligence software platform that includes several tools tableau desktop server online prep and public tableau desktop server and online all effectively serve the same function with the main differences being where they're hosted and the scale at which they operate tableau prep is a data prep tool that lets users extract transform and load data while tableau public is a free data visualization tool perfect for journalists politicians teachers and students tableau is best known for its data visualization product so we'll focus on tableau desktop in this video once you open tableau desktop you'll want to create a new workbook so you can start building visualizations to do this start by connecting to a data source in the left-hand toolbar you can choose from a number of different sources to either connect to data stored in a file or on a server supported file types include microsoft excel text json and pdf files among others for servers you can connect to sources like microsoft sql server mysql oracle and amazon redshift next drag and drop your data sources into the work canvas to start making visualizations you can work with multiple data sources creating relationships between them based on common fields now you can start building visualizations create a new sheet at the bottom of the interface similar to how you would in excel drag and drop your data fields and measures into the row and column cells to start finding insights in your data you can also drop data fields directly onto the canvas to work with your visualization looking at some sample data let's say you want to build a simple visualization that shows the total number of sales for different product categories by country start by dragging the category dimension to the rows field and the country dimension to the columns field now go down to measures and drag and drop sales to the rows field to the right of the category dimension tableau automatically generates a series of bar graphs that show you how many sales you've made across three different product categories by country this is an automatic visualization but you can make some changes to customize it how you like let's color code the countries by going to our measures and dragging and dropping country to the color mark i can also change the visualization to have the country names displayed as labels by moving the country dimension to the label measure since we're dealing with geographic data it might be helpful to see our data visualized as a map tableau makes this easy through the show me function in the top right corner of the display once your data is in place click show me and tableau will recommend some relevant visualizations based on the type of data you're working with for our example we have several different options but let's go with the first map suggestion to see our data plotted on a map as dots because we're working with different product categories tableau automatically turned our data into mini pie charts so we can see how the different products sell in each country making individual visualizations is great but tableau really shines when you create dashboards and stories use the buttons along the bottom of the display to create a new dashboard or story and then use your existing visualizations to begin building them for dashboards drag and drop sheets and objects onto your canvas to create summaries of multiple visualizations you can preview the way your dashboard will look across devices and you can resize your dashboard accordingly to better fit certain screens stories are a unique tableau feature that function like presentations similar to dashboards you can start creating a story by dragging and dropping sheets and dashboards onto your canvas use the text cells above the canvas to provide context or create a narrative and add additional points of clarification using the floating textbox tool you can share your visualizations in several ways first let's give this visualization a name then we can right-click directly on the visualization to quickly share it go to copy image to copy this image to your computer's clipboard and then paste it into a social collaboration software tool like slack or microsoft teams a text document or elsewhere if you have a tableau server or tableau online account you can share your visualization to your site by clicking the share button near the top center of the display finally you can also export your visualizations to powerpoint as a version or as a packaged workbook for other tableau users with the exception of copying a visualization to your computer's clipboard you can use these sharing methods to share a sheet a dashboard or a story still not sure if tableau is right for you use our product selection tool at technologyadvice.com to get a free short list of bi software recommendations click the button on the left to get started

This transcript was generated automatically from the video's captions and may contain errors.