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Tableau For Dummies

Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com

Copyright 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2015952179

ISBN: 978-1-119-13479-4; 978-1-119-13483-1 (ebk); 978-1-119-13491-6 (ebk)

1. Table of Contents

Data analysis and data visualization are vital in todays extremely competitive business climate. But doing great analysis and creating useful visualizations can feel difficult, complex, and not for the faint of heart. Fortunately, a solution is available that makes the whole process much easier and will have you analyzing and visualizing data like a pro in no time. Tableau Desktop is a tool that was designed to enable you to perform complex data analysis tasks and create powerful, interactive visualizations that communicate the analysis. In addition, Tableau allows you to share your analysis and visualizations across your organization, so everyone from coworkers to top management can dig into the data that matters to them. This truly is a tool that provides you with a huge competitive advantage.

In the past, most people got along with using tools like Microsoft Excel to analyze business data. Although theres no getting around the fact that Excel is both popular and useful, Tableau provides a significant boost in power and ease-of-use when it comes to in-depth data analysis, data visualization, and communicating with data. Quite simply, you need a tool like Tableau Desktop to do the job right. Tableau For Dummies provides you with the introduction and information you need to make use of this tool.

Tableau For Dummies isnt the only source of information that you can find about Tableau Desktop, but we like to think that its the easiest source youll find, especially with our easy-access organization. Weve organized this book into several parts so that you can easily find what you need.

In this part, youll get a quick look at Tableau Desktop, see what you can do with this tool, and have a brief introduction to the basics of the product. This is a great place to start, not only for new Tableau Desktop users but also for anyone who is tasked with deciding whether Tableau can fulfill the needs of your organization.

The chapters in this part help you understand the types of data that you can use with Tableau Desktop, show you how to connect to that data, and provide the basics of getting started with data visualizations.

In this part, you get a chance to dig a little bit deeper into working with Tableau Desktop. Youll see how you can use different options to create the best visualizations, how to create special interactive pages that make it easier to share your analyses, and how to tell a story that leads viewers through the analysis process.

The ability to publish and share your data analysis and visualization with the other people in your organization is the subject of this part. Youll quickly see several different options so that you can choose the best one to suit your needs.

After you master the basics of Tableau Desktop, you may want to take things to a higher level; if that sounds like you, this part should be your destination. Here youll find out about more advanced topics like filtering and calculated fields.

We have a tradition of closing our books with some lists of ten or so items that we feel are pretty important for you to know. We give you some tips and other useful information in this part.

To make things just a bit easier to understand, this book follows certain conventions that include the following:

• Bold text means that you should type the text just as it appears in the book. The exception is when youre working through a steps list: Because each step is bold, the text to type is not bold.
• Web addresses and programming code appear in monofont. If youre reading a digital version of this book on a device connected to the Internet, you can click the web address to visit that website, like this: