Shankar Arul - Tableau for Business Users: Learn to Automate and Simplify Dashboards for Better Decision Making

My goal with this book is to help business users learn how to use Tableau for data analytics and visualization. Business users have plenty of questions to answer to run their business effectively. Unfortunately, they do not possess the right tools or the skillset to query the data which holds the answers to these questions. Tableau for Business Users is geared towards data novice business users and will help you master Tableau by walking you through concrete examples and issues that you might face in your day-to-day work.

Over the course of the book, Ill also distill the core of Tableau into a few concepts. From there, its just a matter of combining them in many different ways to build whatever data visualizations and analyses you need. Starting from the fundamentals of data, this book gently builds up the pace by introducing you to the crux of Tableau, the subtleties of authoring calculated fields, and Tableau calculations, all the way up to advanced functionalities such as level of detail calculations. I bring everything together in a chapter on dashboarding, helping you build actionable dashboards to effectively communicate your analysis and visualizations.

Data-driven decision-making is no longer a nice to have in todays context, but an absolute must. This book will prepare you to tackle the challenges of big data and data analytics by helping you to master Tableau without getting bogged down in the technicalities of the tool. Excel , which is the go-to tool for any competent business professional, needs to be complemented by a data visualization tool such as Tableau to help effectively communicate and share your findings. This book will help you in this transition to the era of big data.

As always, I would like to thank my parents, who enabled me to write this book in the first place, and my wife, who supports me in all my endeavors. I would also like to make a special dedication to my kids Nikie and Brooklyn, who show me the joy of life every day. Special thanks to Santosh Arul for his help with Photoshop. You can reach him at sarul.design@gmail.com for your Photoshop and Illustrator design needs.

Over the past few decades, Microsoft Excel has become the de facto data analytics tool for most business users. When you need the sum of two values, it couldnt be simpler than clicking the first value you need to add, following it up with a + sign, and adding the next value. Voil! You have a total of two values. Drag the formula down by clicking the corners. Youve got a sum of two columns.

Unfortunately, this flexibility comes at a cost. The user gets gradually trapped in the world of quick fixes and patched formulas that Excel offers. Initially, Lotus 123, the predecessor of Excel, was conceived primarily as a data entry tool, and indeed, Excel excels at this task.

But now, in this new era of big data , data visualization and data analytics require their own toolkit. The human brain does a very poor job deciphering meaningful trends from a table of raw data (numbers), but at the same time excels at comparing, extrapolating, and spotting trends in visual shapes and colors. It turns out the brain can take in a picture and process it in one stroke while linearly processing text. Imagine a bar chart that condenses 100 rows of data into a few columns against reading the rows one by one. You start to get the picture. Its the responsibility of the analyst to effectively distill and convey the meaning hidden behind the numbers through effective and meaningful visualizations.