Creating Data Stories with Tableau Public: Illustrate your data in a more interactive and interesting way using Tableau Public

Tableau Public allows you to tell your data story and create compelling and interactive data visualizations that invite discovery and education. Tableau Public is sold at a great price—free. It allows you as a data storyteller to create and publish data visualizations without learning how to code or having special knowledge about web publishing. In fact, you can publish data sets of up to 10 million rows or 10 GB to Tableau Public in a single workbook. Tableau Public is a data discovery tool. It should not be confused with enterprise-grade business intelligence tools, such as Tableau Desktop and Server, QlikView, and Cognos Insight. Those tools integrate with corporate networks and security protocols as well as server-based data warehouses. Data visualization software is not a new thing. Businesses have used software to generate dashboards and reports for decades. The new twist comes with data discovery tools, such as Tableau Public. Journalists and bloggers who would like to augment their reporting of static text and graphics can use these data discovery tools, such as Tableau Public, to create compelling, rich data visualizations, which may consist of one or more charts, graphs, tables, and other objects that can be controlled by readers to allow for discovery.

The people who are active members of the Tableau Public community have a few primary traits in common— they are curious, generous with their knowledge and time, and enjoy conversations that relate data to the world around us. Tableau Public maintains a list of blogs of data visualization experts who use Tableau Software.

In the following screenshot, Tableau Zen Masters Anya A'hearn of Databrick and Allan Walker used data on San Francisco bike sharing to show the financial benefits of Bay Area Bike Share, a city-sponsored 30-minute bike sharing program, as well as a map of both the proposed expansion of the program and how far a person can actually ride a bike in half an hour.

This dashboard is featured in the Tableau Public gallery because it relates data to users clearly and concisely. It presents a great public interest story (commuting more efficiently in a notoriously congested city) and then grabs the viewer's attention with maps of current and future offerings. The second dashboard within the analysis is significant, as well. The authors described the Geographic Information Systems (GIS), the tools that they used to create innovative maps, as well as the methodology that went into the final product so that the users who are new to the tool can learn how to create a similar functionality for their own purposes:

The preceding image is republished under the terms of fair use. It was created by Anya A'hearn and Allan Walker. (Source: https://public.tableausoftware.com/views/30Minutes___BayAreaBikeShare/30Minutes___?:embed=y&:loadOrderID=0&:display_count=yes.)

As humans, we relate our experiences to each other in stories, and data points are an important component of stories. They quantify phenomena and, when combined with human actions and emotions, can make them more memorable. When authors create public interest story elements with Tableau Public, readers can interact with the analysis, which creates a highly personal experience and translates into increased participation and decreased abandonment. It's not difficult to embed Tableau Public visualizations into websites and blogs. It is as easy as copying and pasting the JavaScript that Tableau Public automatically renders for you.

Using Tableau Public increases accessibility to stories too. You can view data stories on any mobile device with a web browser and then share it with friends via social media sites such as Twitter or Facebook using Tableau Public's sharing functionality. Stories can be told with text as well as popular and tried-and-true visualization types such as maps, bar charts, lists, heat maps, line charts, and scatterplots. Maps are particularly easier to build in Tableau Public than most other data visualization offerings because Tableau has integrated geocoding (down to the city and postal code) directly into the application. Tableau Public has a built-in date hierarchy that makes it easy for users to drill through time dimensions just by clicking on a button. One of Tableau Software's taglines, Data to the People, is a reflection not only of the ability to distribute analyses sets to thousands of people at once, but also of the enhanced abilities of nontechnical users to explore their own data easily and derive relevant insights for their own community without having to learn a slew of technical skills.

The Tableau Software was originally imagined in the Stanford University Computer Science department, where a research project sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense was launched to study how people can rapidly analyze data. This project merged two branches of computer science—the understanding of data relationships and computer graphics. This mash-up was discovered to be the best way for people to understand and sometimes digest complex data relationships rapidly and, in effect, help readers consume data. This project eventually moved from the Stanford campus to the corporate world, and Tableau Software was born. The usage and adoption of Tableau has since skyrocketed. At the time of writing this book, Tableau is the fastest growing software company in the world and now, Tableau competes directly with older software manufacturers for data visualization and discovery, such as Microsoft, IBM, SAS, Qlik, and Tibco, to name a few.

Most of these are compared by Gartner in its annual Magic Quadrant. For more information, visit http://www.gartner.com/technology/home.jsp.

Tableau Software's flagship program, Tableau Desktop, is a commercial software used by many organizations and corporations throughout the world. Tableau Public is the free version of Tableau's offering, and it is typically used with nonconfidential data either from the public domain or the one that we collected ourselves. This free public offering of Tableau Public is truly unique in the business intelligence and data discovery industry. There is no other software like it—powerful, free, and open to data story authors.

One of the wonderful features about Tableau Public is that you can load data and visualize it on your own. Traditionally, this has been an activity that was undertaken with the help of programmers at work. With Tableau Public and new blogging platforms, nonprogrammers can develop data visualization, publish to the Tableau Public website, and embed the data visualization on their own website. The basic steps to create a Tableau Public visualization are as follows:

Tableau Public is used by some of the leading news organizations across the world, including The New York Times, The Guardian (UK), National Geographic (US), the Washington Post (US), the Boston Globe (US), La Informacion (Spain), and Época (Brazil). In the following sections, we will discuss installing Tableau Public. Then, we will take a look at how we can find some of these visualizations out there in the wild so that we can learn from others and create our own original visualizations.

Now, let's look at the installation steps for Tableau Public:

Exploring Tableau Public

The Tableau Public home screen, as shown in the following screenshot, has several features that allow you to Connect to data, Open workbooks, and Discover the features of Tableau Public:

Tableau encourages new users to watch the video on this welcome page. To do so, click on the button named Watch the Getting Started Video. You can start building your first Tableau Public workbook any time.

You can open the files that you create in Tableau Public by clicking on the Open from Tableau Public link. When you click on the link, Tableau Public will prompt you to log in with the e-mail address that you have used to create your account, as shown in the following screenshot:

When you enter your e-mail and password, Tableau Public will verify it. Then, you will be able to select the file that you would like to open.

The list of files includes the names, modification dates, and size of the workbooks that you have saved in Tableau Public. It also includes the ability for you to search by entering a string of text.

When you find the workbook that you would like to open, click on Open, and then the most recently saved version will open in Tableau Public on your computer, as shown in the following screenshot:

If you have not created an account, click on the link at the bottom of the screen that says Create one now for free.

The Create a Profile screen requires you to enter information in several fields, as shown in the following screenshot:

Now, let's look at each of these fields:

When you click on to Go to My Profile, your web browser will open your new profile page on Tableau Public. This is a page that displays information that you enter about yourself and your interests as well as a photograph of your choosing and links to other websites with which you're affiliated.

Your profile page also displays and allows you to manage your Tableau Public workbooks. We will discuss the profile in greater detail in Chapter 9, Publishing Your Work.

The right pane of the Tableau Public 9.0 home screen, as shown in the following screenshot, has several features that help you learn how to use the Tableau Public 9.0:

Let's take a look at each of these features:

Resources that you can open include the Tableau Public blog, sample Data Sets, and links to live training. You can view all of these on Tableau Public's resources page in your Internet browser by visiting https://public.tableau.com/s/resources.

We often learn by viewing other people's work. So, let's take a look at a few data visualizations created by other authors. Note that most Tableau Public data visualizations allow you to download the entire workbook. If data is not readily downloadable on the workbook page, you can export the underlying data to Excel while inside the workbook by using the desktop client of Tableau Public. There are several great places to find the best Tableau Public data visualizations, including Tableau Public and the VIZ OF THE DAY galleries (for more information, visit https://public.tableau.com/s/gallery) and the Tableau Public blog (to have a look at the blog, visit https://public.tableau.com/s/blog).

To make use of a recommended authors and profile finder, visit https://public.tableau.com/s/authors.

The Tableau Public gallery is an excellent place to look at examples of works of others, and the Tableau Public team has curated a set of popular visualizations by topic and number of views.

The recommended authors page (https://public.tableau.com/s/authors) is a fun place to look at both well-known and established Tableau Public authors (bloggers, journalists, and the Tableau staff) as well as lesser known authors to explore their work. You can also access an author's profile page and see their work by clicking on the View Profile button under their name, as shown in the following screenshot:

In this chapter, we had a look at how Tableau Public is commonly used. We also discussed how to download and install Tableau Public, explore Tableau Public's features and learn about Tableau Public, and find other authors' data visualizations using the Tableau Galleries and Recommended Authors/Profile Finder function on the Tableau website. In the next chapter, we will explore data connections and manipulations in Tableau Public.