Preface

This edition of the bestselling Tableau guide will teach you how to leverage Tableau’s newest features and offerings in various paradigms of the BI domain. Updated with fresh topics including the newest features in Tableau Server, Prep, and Desktop, as well as up-to-date examples and solutions to real-world challenges, this book will take you from mastering essential Tableau concepts to advanced functionalities. A new chapter on data governance has also been added.

Throughout this book, you will learn how to use various files and databases to connect to Tableau Desktop and Prep Builder to easily perform data preparation and handling, perform complex joins, spatial joins, unions, and data blending tasks using practical examples. You will also get to grips with executing data densification and explore other expert-level examples to help you with calculations, mapping, and visual design using Tableau Exchange.

Later chapters will teach you all about improving dashboard performance, connecting to Tableau Server, and understanding data visualization with hands-on examples. Finally, you will cover advanced use cases such as self-service analysis, time series analysis, and geo-spatial analysis, and connect Tableau to Python and R to implement programming functionalities within Tableau.

Finally, a brand-new chapter has been added that covers a very hot topic: data governance. You will explore an introduction to important features of Tableau Server that will get you prepared for compliance with GDPR and other data privacy and governance regulations.

By the end of this Tableau book, you will have mastered Tableau 2023 and you will be able to tackle common and advanced challenges in the data analytics space.

Who this book is for

This book is designed for business analysts, business intelligence professionals, and data analysts who want to master Tableau to solve a range of data science and business intelligence problems. Prior exposure to Tableau will help you get to grips with the features more quickly, but it is not a prerequisite.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Reviewing the Basics, takes you through the basic and essential Tableau concepts needed to get you started.

Chapter 2, Getting Your Data Ready, is a theory-oriented chapter that will help you understand data preparation and henceforth work more easily with messy data.

Chapter 3, Using Tableau Prep Builder, discusses Tableau Prep Builder, the not-so-little Extract – Transform- Load (ETL) brother of Tableau Desktop.

Chapter 4, Learning about Joins, Blends, and Data Structures, answers the question of whether to use relationships, joins, or blends to combine data.

Chapter 5, Introducing Table Calculations, covers the special case of table calculations, which use the data order to assign values like ranks.

Chapter 6, Utilizing OData, Data Densification, Big Data, and Google BigQuery, teaches you how to leverage big data solutions and the concept of data densification.

Chapter 7, Practicing Level of Detail Calculations, helps you understand this advanced topic, which can change the aggregation of your data for certain calculations.

Chapter 8, Going Beyond the Basics, introduces you to advanced visualization concepts and Tableau Exchange, Extensions, Accelerators, and Connectors.

Chapter 9, Working with Maps, covers Tableau’s internal, and some external, mapping capabilities using custom polygons, heatmaps, and layered maps.

Chapter 10, Presenting with Tableau, shows tips and tricks on how to use Tableau for presentation purposes.

Chapter 11, Designing Dashboards and Best Practices for Visualizations, takes you through different formatting techniques and design rules to maximize the aesthetics of your visualizations.

Chapter 12, Leveraging Advanced Analytics, will help you take your analytical skills to the next level with three advanced use cases to follow along with: self-service, time series, and geo-spatial analytics.

Chapter 13, Improving Performance, addresses various aspects of performance with the intent to empower you to create fast-loading dashboards for the best user experience.

Chapter 14, Exploring Tableau Server and Tableau Cloud, covers the different offerings and functionalities of Tableau Server, including Ask Data and Data Details.

Chapter 15, Integrating Programming Languages, shows you how to integrate R and Python with Tableau to enable (almost) unlimited analytics capabilities.

Chapter 16, Developing Data Governance Practices, introduces you to the vast and important topic of data governance and how to comply with regulations by using Tableau Server.

To get the most out of this book

Basic knowledge of Tableau will be an advantage and you will need a Tableau license after your 14-day free trial ends. You will also benefit from basic knowledge of R or Python if you wish to get the most out of Chapter 15, Integrating Programming Languages. You can, however, also follow along with the steps and learn as you go.

Other helpful installations will be mentioned in the book as needed, all in the realm of the average free-ware installation on Windows or Mac.

Download the example code files

The code bundle for the book is also hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Mastering-Tableau-2023-Fourth-Edition. We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://packt.link/TybKH.

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. For example: “When recording performance, Tableau initially creates a file in  My Tableau Repository\Logs, named performance_[timestamp].tab.”

A block of code is set as follows:

SCRIPT_REAL("x <- lm(.arg1 ~ .arg2 + .arg3 + .arg4) x$fitted", SUM(Profit), COUNT(Quantity), SUM(Sales), AVG(Discount) 
)

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, also appear in the text like this. For example: “Place Profit_Expected on the Columns shelf, next to Profit. Then click on either one and enable Dual Axis.”

Warnings or important notes appear like this.

Tips and tricks appear like this.

Get in touch

Feedback from our readers is always welcome.

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If you are interested in becoming an author: If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, please visit http://authors.packtpub.com.

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