The Tao of Tableau

Tableau is an almost frictionless tool beautifully designed for creating the highest quality visual data analysis.
Inexperienced users are able to achieve stunningly good results right off the bat—graphs and charts and tables of the highest quality appear, seemingly magically, as if data analysis is the most natural and graceful of activities.

This approachability is tremendously appealing and effective for unfamiliar users—it's easy to get immediate high quality results.

Eager to please, Tableau appears simple and uncomplicated, and it is. But that's not all it is: behind its inviting facade is an astonishingly powerful and comprehensive tool. Lying quietly, untroubling its simple elegance, Tableau possesses powers and abilities far beyond those of the tools that came before it.

Understanding Tableau's Tao – its fundamental concepts, philosophies, and mechanisms – is esential for mastering its abilities and achieving the full range of analytical excellence it enables.

The Tao of Tableau is a guide to gaining this understanding. It's based upon personal experiences in learning Tableau 1.0—undergoing the paradigm shifts, exploring its hidden mysteries and byways, puzzling through its mazes, enduring the inevitable frustrations (yes, there are some), and in helping my clients, partners, and other interested people become Tableau-proficient.

The Path to Enlightenment.

Tableau's View of Data

Tableau sees data as being organized into sets of records; each record contains distinct fields.

Table basics

More table stuff – joining Tables, etc.

Data has properties. Tableau understands data in terms of these properties; understanding them is essential to the Tao.

numbers & letters & Dates & Nulls – oh my!

Slicing/dicing – counting/summing – Dimensions and Measures

Lumpy or Smooth? – Discrete and Continuous

Things to do with Data

In broad terms, there are only a few things one can do with data during analysis. Data can be:
Sorted – e.g. by Name
Aggregated – e.g. sum Gems
Fields to use can be Selected – usually implicit.
Records to analyze can be Selected – e.g. if ID = 12345

If you ask Tableau to "just do something" with some data (and we'll show you how), Tableau will do what it thinks is appropriate.

Understanding what Tableau does all by itself requires understanding how Tableau thinks about data.

Achieving this understanding is an important step on the path to the Tao.

Things to do with data – sorting, aggregating, selecting

What Tableau does – by itself, and when

What Tableau –can– do – things you can tell it to do