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 amount 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 action 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 decision 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 industry from an NGO 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 Dashboard or report. It does not require you to have knowledge about any programming language as you can create Insightful report or Dashboard with simple drag and drop.
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 amount 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 action 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 decision 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 industry from an NGO 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 Dashboard or report. It does not require you to have knowledge about any programming language as you can create Insightful report or Dashboard with simple drag and drop.
Why to 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 parameter instead of using hardcoded value. Further, Tableau lets users create custom chart and let you make changes as you see fit with its dual axis feature, which allows users to overlap there visuals and make creative changes that will help end user to easily understand complex data.
Data Sources
Tableau can connect to most of the data sources that are widely used. Users can connect to excel workbook to most of the cloud based data sources. Tableau allows user to connect to multiple data sources in order to take 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.
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Source: idwbi.com |
Tableau Connections
Tableau offers different connection type 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 optimized for complex data visualization where we use multiple filters, calculation, and parameter. 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.
Tablea Products and Services
Tableau offers a lot of different product 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 dashboard 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), creating different join type for different data sources. We can further change the data type, edit the value directly and a lot more.
Tableau Desktop: Tableau desktop is the highest benchmark standard in data visualization. It offers interactive interface to create Visualization from simple report to complex yet easy to use dashboard for your team or organization.
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Source: Tableau.com |
Tableau Online: Tableau online is cloud hosted analytics platform, where you can publish your dashboards or reports to share it with other users. Tableau online take away the hassle to configure server, manage software or hardware upgrades.
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Source: Tableau.com |
Tableau Mobile: Tableau mobile lets us access the dashboard at anytime and anywhere. Tableau automatically creates optimized dashboard layouts for mobiles.
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Source: Tableau.com |
I hope that this blog about Introduction to Tableau helps you to have an understanding about Tableau, why to use it and which data sources to connect with it, different products offered by Tableau, what these products are used to create Visualization and sharing it with your team or customer. In the upcoming blogs we will come with Joins, Filters and practical implementation in Tableau, so stay tuned.
About Amlgo
Labs : 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 includes 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 View, OneSumX Development, Moody’s
Risk, IBM 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 top 10 Data Analytics Start-ups in India, 2019 and 2020.
Please feel free to comment or share your views and thoughts. You can always reach out to us by sending an email at info@amlgolabs.com or filling a contact form at the end of the page.
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