Basics of Tableau

Getting Started with Data

This class demonstration walks through the fundamentals of how to connect to your data in Tableau Desktop.

Connect to Data Screen

For this example we’ll be using the “Global Superstore” Excel file. Superstore is a data set of sales for a global retail chain
that sells furniture, office supplies, and technology goods.

Connecting to Tables
o Change column names
o Change the data type
o Split field

Live versus Extract

Something to consider before we begin analyzing our data is if we want to connect live or extract.
Connecting live leaves the data in the database or source file.
• This is best when we want to leverage a high performance database’s capabilities, or to get up-to-the-second
changes in data visualized in Tableau.
• Sometimes connecting live can result in a slow experience, depending on the database.
• A Live Connection means that Tableau sends queries to your database and retrieves data.
The other option is to extract the data into Tableau's high performance in-memory data engine.
• This can help when connecting to a slow database or to take query load off critical systems.
• Extracts are saved subsets of data that you can use to improve performance or to take advantage of Tableau
functionality not available or supported in your original data.

Superstore Data Set

• Understand the most important fields in the data (category, sales, etc.)
• Dimensions are discrete and Measures are continuous

Quick Viz Example

• Double-click Sales – Tableau has aggregated the sales.
• What if we want to see Sales at a more granular level?
• Observe the marks tab -> size
• Find category wise sales/ average sales
• Sort the bar chart. Use Marks card to adjust color and size, add/remove labels, etc.
• Drag out Sales, and drag Number of Records to the shelf.

Connecting to Multiple Tables

• Join returns table to the orders table.
• We now have columns from both Orders and Returns in our data window and are ready to start our analysis!
• What other information can you draw from the newly connected table. Create a viz.
• Find out how many orders were returned