Tableau Introduction
Tableau is a data visualization platform that lets you connect to data from almost any source and turn it into interactive charts, dashboards, and stories - without writing code.
Why Tableau?
- Drag-and-drop interface for building charts quickly.
- Connects to spreadsheets, databases, cloud warehouses, and web data.
- Interactive dashboards that update as underlying data changes.
- Widely used across business intelligence, analytics, and reporting roles.
The Tableau Product Family
- Tableau Desktop - the authoring application used to build workbooks and dashboards.
- Tableau Server / Tableau Cloud - platforms for publishing and sharing dashboards with others.
- Tableau Public - a free version for publishing visualizations publicly online.
Core Building Blocks
A Tableau file is called a workbook, made up of one or more sheets (individual charts), which can be combined into dashboards and sequenced into stories.
Tableau is built around the idea of visual analysis - instead of writing queries first and charting later, you drag fields onto a canvas and the visualization builds as you explore.