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The Tableau website actually has a whole series of training videos that are a fantastic primer. I work at a university and have student employees who assist me with data analysis. I was start new hires out watching the Tableau' training series. https://www.tableau.com/learn/training/20211
If you have upgraded to 2019.2 I believe there should be a new calc MAKELINE, from looking at the new features page it looks like the calc should be something like this
// making line from 2 points MAKELINE( MAKEPOINT(Origin_Lat, Origin_Long), MAKEPOINT(Destination_Lat, Destination_Long) )
This question gets asked quite frequently here. Check out the useful resources in the sidebar.
Make sure you sign up to Tableau Public and download the free version to start playing around with. There are a bunch of free introductory videos on Tableau's website too. I'd particularly recommend Makeover Monday as a good place to start on Public as you can get good feedback if you share what you build, plus the data can often be quite real-world applicable.
Certs aren't essential, but can sometimes give you the edge. I wouldn't focus on them if I were you though, practical expertise is far more important.
Desktop or Server?
Right now Tableau has their eLearning stuff available at zero cost for 90 days right now. Your boss would likely appreciate you starting there.
You could try to hire a consultant from the Tableau partner program (https://www.tableau.com/partners).
It will be a bit more expensive than trying to find a freelancer, but you'll get a quality developer that tableau has certified. I'll throw in a plug for the consulting firm I work for as we have a partnership with tableau. If you want to go that route I'd be happy to have a chat with you.
You can do this via a spatial join in tableau. You’ll have to find an a shapefile (or geojson) of zip code polygons of the area, which you should find pretty easily.
In the spatial join calculation, you’ll convert the lat and long fields in your original dataset to a “point” in tableau using MakePoint(). This will allow Tableau to do the “intersect” join type. The example here is almost exactly your use case but with neighborhoods instead of zipcodes. Also this has a useful breakdown as well.
Export to Powerpoint will be available in version 2019.1 (we’re currently in 2018.3), however it is available in Beta now:
https://www.tableau.com/products/coming-soon
Scroll down and you’ll see the Export to Powerpoint feature listed. Hope that helps.
Data Driven Alerts are a thing - https://www.tableau.com/about/blog/2017/4/save-time-data-driven-alerts-tableau-103-67888
What tools you use in conjunction with Tableau will mostly depend on where your data is coming from. You'd use those tools (SQL, Excel, R) to get your data in a place where you can ingest it into Tableau. And you can decide based on your skill set and data needs where the bulk of the heavy lifting will take place. Some people might do as much of the heavy lifting as possible in SQL or R and use Tableau as a visualizer/front end only. Other people will do minimal data processing beforehand, connect Tableau right to SQL and ingest the raw data tables and let Tableau do the heavy lifting.
Definitely the best place to start learning is Tableau's free videos. Because they're free and right from the horse's mouth.
Tableau Online is awesome.
Here are a few things you should probably google.
Understanding of medical codes, what they are, how they relate to each other, etc..
- CPT codes
- Modifer codes
- NDC code
- Diagnosis codes
- DRG codes
Types of Medical Claims
- Professional
- Institutional (Inpatient vs Outpatient)
- Rx
Provider Types
- Billing Provider
- Service Facility
- Rendering Provider
- Order Provider
- Referring Provider
- Supervising Provider
- Attending Provider
- Operating Provider
Patient Demographics
- Height / Weight / Age / Race / Claims History / Depression / Claims / Medical History (Diabetes, Hypertension, Cholesterol, etc..)
Other
- Health Outcomes
- Risk
- Cost / Efficiency of care
Once you have a general understanding of all the terms and concepts above you can see how one might combine these things to visualize numerous thing like:
How specific patient demographics impact the medical outcome / costs of care.
How effective are specific types / groups of medical providers?
Trends in medical procedures.
Finally read up on some of these projects / dashboards
Hard to say what might be an issue. I don't think there is anything wrong with the above context but the nuances of the posting are going to probably be important. If I were looking for a gig, some things I could probably look for are:
- Tableau is relatively new piece of software. Are you asking that people have several years worth of experience?
- What's the actual job? Are you asking them to replace formerly built Microstrategy dashboards in Tableau or is it building things from scratch?
- Is it deep-dive analysis or building reporting/monitoring dashboards?
That said, from my LinkedIn messages, Tableau seems to be a pretty in-demand gig right now so it might be facing a similar battle as finding a good programmer. Some tips for leads are:
- Search Tableau Public to find people in the Salt Lake City area.
- Join the Salt Lake City TUG (http://community.tableau.com/groups/salt-lake-city)
- Post a link on the Tableau LinkedIn group (https://www.linkedin.com/groups/118463/jobs)
- Add a link here -- at least, I don't think there's anything wrong with posting a link
Good luck!
Is this for business or personal use? You can use Tableau ProServ, tableau partners, or just look around on fiverr or some other websites for contractors.. (probably not... depends on nature of your data)
There's no restriction on updating data with Tableau Online. If you need to test functionality for API pushes, go get a free development site from the developer program https://www.tableau.com/developer. If it works for you, then you can put it into production using a Tableau Online site.
You can absolutely join Excel and databases. You can also join two Excel sheets to each other. I never specified that it has to be in a database. Create a list of dates in an Excel workbook then join that to your main data source. You could also union blank data along with the future dates. There are several ways to do this, trust me you aren't the first with this question.
https://www.tableau.com/about/blog/2016/7/integrate-your-data-cross-database-joins-56724
I was able to answer my own questions. Instead of deleting this post, I thought I'd share how I fixed it by simply referring to this community thread on Tableau: https://community.tableau.com/thread/196812, which had the solution pointing to this: https://www.tableau.com/about/blog/LOD-expressions.
Tableau is an incredible resource that can be utilized in many different ways so that sounds like an awesome goal!
I would check out some of the learnings at Udemy.com. They have a lot of Tableau trainings for beginners and some are pretty inexpensive or free. There are also many other systems that they teach should you want to expand your horizons beyond Tableau at any point.
Honestly, if your organization has an Oracle DB I would find the DBA who works on it and become their best friend.
If you can't do that, I would just learn some basic sql on http://sqlzoo.net
If that doesn't interest you, my only advice is to learn PowerQuery/PowerPivot in Excel and do all your data grouping and reduction steps there....save as a csv and connect it to tableau.
But you should really learn SQL.
Um…. You need a Creator license to use desktop? You can explore online in your server, publish, etc.
https://www.tableau.com/pricing/how-to-decide
And your server admin needs to enable LBL. It’s enabled by default in upgrades, so it was shut off deliberately.
https://help.tableau.com/current/server/en-us/license_lblm.htm
I think this might be what you are looking for: Perform advanced spatial analysis with spatial join
It requires version 2018.2
Hi Xilc
Dorian's post is aimed at someone who is familiar with Tableau. His instructions, fairly, assume the user knows how to export data, create sets, and build scatterplots. His beeswarm is downloadable from Tableau Public, too, so you could download it and take a look at what he's done.
My next advice is that you should focus on the basics for now in Tableau. A beeswarm is a specific chart to solve a specific problem. Tableau is much more powerful than that; I recommend you watch much more of the training videos to learn the basics of Tableau. You will know you are ready to make beeswarm plots when you can read Dorian's post and see it for what it is: a well written tutorial aimed at intermediate/advanced Tableau users.
(Disclaimer: I work at Tableau)
Congrats on your job!
Have you checked out the free learning videos we have on our website and YouTube? They are pretty good for getting a broad overview of the features of the product. For example, the specific feature you talk about - tooltips - have two videos available showing you how to create them; one for regular tooltips and one on how to embed a viz in a tooltip.
The free training can be found here: https://www.tableau.com/learn/training Our YouTube channel is here: https://www.youtube.com/user/tableausoftware
Good luck!
Tableau has a color pallet specifically for color blind users as well. You can include that in the requirements. Good stuff from them here: https://www.tableau.com/about/blog/2016/4/examining-data-viz-rules-dont-use-red-green-together-53463
3 - 5 minutes seems fairly long. Can you provide a high level overview of what you are attempting to do? I wouldn't expect that long a wait until you have significantly under what you need hardware wise, or are doing extensive ETL work (using Tableau) against millions or billions of rows.
I'm sure you've seen this before, but it's well worth a read. https://www.tableau.com/learn/whitepapers/designing-efficient-workbooks
I'll be there with my boss and several others from my company that I don't know too well. Not sure of what everyone has planned for during the week, but my wife and I are also going early and are going to a craft beer fest the Saturday beforehand. Link to the Groupon for it below.
Use relationships instead of joins in tableau. Join the relationship the same way you would use a join. This way your totals will be correct when trying to sum or do whatever calc you are looking to do.
Where did you see that they have changed the test format please? On the Tableau website it says 30 questions with multiple choice, multiple response, and hands on.
https://www.tableau.com/en-gb/learn/certification/desktop-specialist
Hey , Tableau has opened up it's paid learning service for free. You get 90 day access a whole slew of things. You should check that out as well. From design to tableau Architecture. Look it up https://www.tableau.com/learn/training/elearning.
Tableau also has set of curated datasets.
Make over Monday and the tableau community are good options for datasets as well.
Because you don't have permission...
>The trademarks, logos, and service marks ("Marks") displayed on this Site are the property of Tableau Software or third parties. You are not permitted to use the Marks without the prior written consent of Tableau or such third party that may own the Marks.
If you insist and want to risk them finding out: https://dev3lop.com/tableau-logo/
I actually send new hires here instead:
The other online videos go fast and are solid but this gives you a starter workbook, a completed workbook and has a great classroom pace.
Set actions in version 2018.3 will sort you out in no time. Upgrade if you can. Check our this article on set actions - pretty cool stuff.
Open on a desktop to play with the dashboards yourself.
So OP, here is my advice, I have performance tuned multiple dashboards before (mostly connecting live to a SQL-Server database) and here is my 2 cents.
Context filters used to force Tableau to throw data into a temp table and was a way to speed up performance if done right. This is also noted in the link shared by /u/Donahub3
However this has since been changed and is no longer the case. Using context filters is now only a mechanism one should employ if it makes sense given your calculations and the Tableau order of operations - i.e. you want a dynamic Top 10 that always show top 10 given the filters or you need a FIXED LoD to work a certain way. (https://onlinehelp.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/order_of_operations.html)
This is further solidified by Alan Eldrige from Tableau Software in his whitepaper "Best Practices for Designing Efficient Tableau Workbooks" which all Tableau developers should read.
Alan writes and I quote:
"You should no longer use context filters as a mechanism for improving query performance."
https://www.tableau.com/sites/default/files/whitepapers/designing-efficient-workbooks-v10.0.pdf
So therefore the short answer is: Poorly, multiple context filters most like affect performance poorly in your case.
I would recommend Tableau's Training Videos to get an overview of the product and learn some of the lingo. I could throw terms at you, but without context that wouldn't be very helpful.
Information Dashboard Design - great book.
Information Dashboard Design: Displaying Data for At-a-Glance Monitoring https://www.amazon.com/dp/1938377001/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glc_fabc_29t.Fb193K3PT
Agree with others on Storytelling With Data. It’s a good high level process for communicating a message with data. The book I am linking to gives dashboard specific guidance. It’s on sale too!
I don't know of one, sorry, but maybe instead you could use something like this to dump your messages into a google sheet, then use Tableau's native connector?
https://ifttt.com/applets/73749p-a-google-spreadsheet-for-all-incoming-gmails
It wasn't three tips per minute but these women were amazing with 21 tips in 25 minutes:
https://www.tableau.com/events/tc/2021/tableau-speed-tips-shortcuts-and-tricks-all-skill-levels
If you want to move to live dashboards then relational databases and SQL should be your next stop. DataCamp.com is an excellent platform to learn (and extend your Python and R as well)
You're talking about Power BI Report Server, which is a legacy, on-prem version, used by a small minority of companies. It's not the main offering that people think of as "Power BI", nor is it included in every edition of SQL Server (you need Enterprise Edition with Software Assurance, as shown in your link).
Making a broad statement like "Power BI is included with SQL Server", when it only applies to a minority of Power BI users, and requires an above-average SQL license, is not correct.
I would recommend starting out from the link below. The videos are manageable and easy to get through, and they've categorized everything so you know what you're getting yourself into. It's also on Tableau's website. This really helped me when I first started: Tableau Training
Additionally, going to Tableau Public is a great way to learn. You can see other people's vizzes, and if you see something you like, the publisher usually has the workbook available for download where you can reverse engineer it and learn how to make it yourself: Tableau Public
you could also use Tableau Prep Builder to split the "Flavors" column, then pivot the data with those fields so you end up with a table that looks like this instead:
Contact Number Flavors Name Zip Code
111-111-1111 Chocolate John 12345
111-111-1111 Strawberry John 12345
111-111-1111 Vanilla John 12345
222-222-2222 Strawberry Sarah 54321
333-333-3333 Chocolate Kevin 12345
444-444-4444 Strawberry Liam 32145
444-444-4444 Vanilla Liam 32145
From there you would:
1) put "Flavors" on the Rows shelf
2) Convert it to a Count Distinct (click on the blue pill, find the "Measures" sub-menu--> Count)
3) Put a new copy of "Flavors" on color to build a stacked bar chart
4) ...and/or place another copy of "Flavors" on the Columns shelf
5) Turn on the Mark Labels to see the values on the bars
It's worth spending some time on the free training videos on the Tableau website as well, they're helpful.
The maintenance version (the bit at the end) is important though you see so maybe try 2020.2.13 which was released April 2021 https://www.tableau.com/support/releases/desktop/2020.2.13
​
*Edit fixing link as I saw the same issue you did with the "not found" error
You can find an explanation @ 31:30 in the webinar link below. I walk through exactly how to use a parameter and calculated field to swap a dimension in a chart but you can also do the same thing with measures.
https://www.tableau.com/learn/webinars/beginner-banking-demo-topic-part-2?ssologin=true#video
Tableau run a course in visual analytics that focuses on the aesthetics including how the brain processes visualisations and how to make them user friendly. You get a lot of resources with it including workbooks full of example dashboards.
It's pretty expensive but a good couple of days if work will pay.
Tableau actually has some data sets available and suggestions for just this sort of thing that you can check out! https://www.tableau.com/learn/articles/free-public-data-sets and https://www.tableau.com/about/blog/2019/2/public-data-sets-102221
From what I see, only the the Desktop Specialist certification (which is also the only one with a 50% discount) is worth doing as there is no expiry of the title. Both Associate and Professional titles have a time limit of 2 and 3 years respectively so you basically have to keep retaking the exams every few years. If you could get your company to sponsor it, it would be great. Otherwise, I think it makes more sense to take only the Specialist certificate but continue bridging what the Associate and Professional exams are testing in your online portfolio website.
For a second there I thought I'd got his name wrong constantly and he never corrected me - but you're right, there is another VP with a ver similar title to Mark's (Product Management instead of Marketing) called Dan Jewett: https://www.tableau.com/about/blog/contributors/dan-jewett-0
Now I want to know if they're related as well!
Building database tech/software that intercepts Tableau queries and rewrites them. This is done in a couple other pieces of software - for example, [AtScale] (https://www.tableau.com/solutions/atscale).
*** Full Disclosure: I work for Tableau ***
Definitely check out the Academic program. Tableau offers a 1 year Full Desktop + Prep license to students (and Instructors) with the ability to renew each year you're in the academic program.
https://www.tableau.com/academic/students
- Irwin
Hi, if you’re able to download a local copy of the data source and depending on what version of tableau you’re on you should be able to get the database and excel in the same tableau source so your calculations work. This would be a temporary fix till your IT person can get the data in the database. I have attached the description from tableau that describes this process since I know if I tried I’d butcher it.
https://www.tableau.com/about/blog/2016/7/integrate-your-data-cross-database-joins-56724
Hope this helps!
Does your customer have access to your Server or own their own Tableau Desktop?
If so, you can just expose the data source to them: https://www.tableau.com/about/blog/2017/6/unleash-your-data-sources-data-server-71878
If it helps your cause with the whole “can’t connect to a CSV” argument from IT, there are some prebuilt dashboards for ServiceNow here ( you should be able to download them) https://www.tableau.com/products/dashboard-starters
Believe there is also a native connector to it if you have permissions so you don’t have to go to Excel then Tableau.
I'm on mobile, so I'm sorry for the bad formatting. I think the most beneficial thing for me was just playing with the program. I wanted to learn, so I thought of different things I'd like to visualize and I would play with the program until I could figure it out. I think one of the most important things is coming up with a project or an end goal and trying to accomplish it with the program. I have a background in mapping with ArcGIS, so a lot of what I wanted to do revolved around that. GIS shapefiles integrate into Tableau pretty nicely, so I was a little ahead of the curve when it came to that stuff. As far as helpful resources go, I'd say that r/Tableau and r/dataisbeautiful were very beneficial. Not only was I able to ask questions, but I reached out to people on these subs for help. Not always, but typically people on here are very helpful. Another great resource was the help section on Tableau's website found here. There are videos and training tutorials covering a ton through there. Lastly, I download workbooks that people posted on here or on the Tableau Gallery and reverse engineered them to learn how they developed different functions and visualizations. Through all of this I was able to get a pretty good grasp of a lot of the program, but as I said I'm still learning as well.
Maybe this would help? https://www.tableau.com/fast-pace-innovation?qt-new_feature_archive=6 (Scroll down, but it only goes to 9.0)
https://www.tableau.com/10-0-features
I'll admit that I don't always remember which features came in when though, especially if I don't use every single feature every day, so I'd be worried to be judged based on my familiarity with the entire feature set.
Desktop is the tool to build reports and dashboards and Server is the place to distribute those findings.
Online is more or less equal to Server.
You need Desktop and Server or Desktop and Online.
Tableau has changed their setup a bit. So you are buying offerings. You need at least 1 Creator license (Desktop and Server access) and as many Explorer/Viewers as clients you want to allow access to. Just ask a sales rep from Tableau
boy, i had no idea. website shows:
System Requirements:
- Microsoft® Windows® 8, 7, Vista, or XP; or Server 2012, 2008, or 2003
- 40 megabytes minimum free disk space
- 32-bit color depth recommended
- 32-bit or 64-bit versions of Windows*
unfortunately, the asterisk next to the last line isn't explained anywhere on that page.
You may not be able to do what you want in the native Tableau Desktop interface, you probably can with custom SQL queries. Alternatively you can use a separate program to prepare your data before hand. Alteryx has been the typical go to suggested by Tableau themselves for some time, but its relatively expensive (~$5k base annually). Tableau recently released a program called Tableau Prep you could try.
It is packaged with desktop in their Creator offering
https://www.tableau.com/pricing/teams-orgs
Existing customers have it for free 2 years on existing desktop licenses under maintenance. Have to convert to the new price model to keep the tool.
i'd recommend checking out the white paper tableau put out on it. it's entirely possible your books are slow because of how your filters are organized and what you are filtering.
https://www.tableau.com/learn/whitepapers/designing-efficient-workbooks
I would start your investigation by using the Performance Recorder to understand where the performance slowdown is occurring, there's no reason to say this is definitely due to RLS, it could be design or other areas that is driving the performance issue, this http://onlinehelp.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/perf_record_create_desktop.html - also read this whitepaper to understand how to optimize workbooks for perf https://www.tableau.com/learn/whitepapers/designing-efficient-workbooks
This sounds odd. I found a help article about creating groups from culsters. It specifically calls out the following constraints:
You will not be able to save Clusters to the Data pane under any of the following circumstances: * When the measures in the view are disaggregated and the measures you are using as clustering variables are not the same as the measures in the view. * When the Clusters you want to save are on the Filters shelf. * When Measure Names or Measure Values is in the view. * When there is a blended dimension in the view.
Even if it is one of these cases, it sounds like it is being handled poorly. You should open a ticket with Tableau so they can fix it.
Well thanks, man. Desktop still is super intuitive, but getting used to Server (and updating) generally takes a bit of trial and error. You'll do just fine, though, super easy. As everyone always says around here, take a look at the tutorials as they're really simple yet super helpful in gettin' a grip of everyday functions. Greetings!
I did find this white paper: https://www.tableau.com/sites/default/files/2021-10/Designing-Efficient-Workbooks-2021-Interworks_0.pdf
​
Reading through it now.
Classroom Intermediate training provides some practices on LOD. But eLearning doesn't do that. Still, both complement each other nicely so I'd recommend taking all the courses you can and read this blog on LOD expressions https://www.tableau.com/about/blog/LOD-expressions
In addition to that other wrote, here's a blog that is still useful https://www.tableau.com/about/blog/LOD-expressions
Besides this, think about what people dit before this functionality was implemented. People used blends from a duplicate datasource at a different granularity than the viz level of detail, combined with window calculations to still get the desired result
If rash and every cell is properly filled, and values never contain a pipe character, and if performance of your data allows it, I would use the following expression first
[Cleaned_unparsed_data] =
REGEXP_REPLACE([Raw_unparsed_data], "_+", "|")
And subsequently you can right click that field in the data pane and Transform, Split them using the | character.
Try extracting your data and right click your datasource connection from within a worksheet to select Extract, Compute Calculations Now to ensure the parsed data is materialised in the extract.
Happy building!
P. S.: if your data contains pipes you need a different Regexp pattern P. P. S.: Read more here https://www.tableau.com/about/blog/2015/6/become-regular-regular-expressions-39802
Yes, you can now Autosave on Tableau Cloud: https://www.tableau.com/about/blog/2022/6/release-data-stories-autosave-inproduct-exchange. Initial release is for Published workbooks.
Whitepaper directly from Tableau's site on optimizing workbooks
> However, when it comes to production use cases, custom SQL has some performance trade-offs. In particular, Tableau leverages the custom SQL as a subquery. Each query Tableau creates will contain your custom SQL surrounded by the Tableau specific elements. In short, Custom SQL creates long and confusing looking queries. For many databases the resulting complex queries will often achieve worse results, despite their best efforts to optimize. If possible, avoid custom SQL in production.
Awesome. Pluralsight also has a class so I'd rather go for this one since I already have a subscription. However I can't find this certification on the Tableau website: https://www.tableau.com/learn/certification
Has it been deprecated or something?
Here is the link to the videos. I specifically picked version 2021.1 because after that version, they cut out a lot of the videos that would still be relevant. I think they are shifting to doing more paid training from them, which is unfortunate.
I would also spend an hour or so understanding SQL queries at a high level. Understanding why you do Sum([sales]) instead of just [sales] will be critical. Once you yet aggregate calcs down, they learn Level of Detail (LOD) calcs, they can take you to that next level.
Good luck, and know that googling "tableau (topic)" will solve 80% of your issues, the other 20% in my experience is because it won't exactly match how it was set up in excel, so you have to retrain your audience.
Tableau has a lot of great free video content on sites like this:
https://www.tableau.com/learn/training/20221
But after the very basics, it’s just… every time I can’t figure something out, google it. The tableau community is so active online that you’re bound to find the same question, same problem, whatever either on a forum or a blog post. Or YouTube too. Lots of trial & error, learning on the fly just like you’re doing. I’ve just got about 7-8 years Tableau experience doing that and after a while it’s all just “clicked” :) you’ll get there.
Some other recommendations…
- Tableau Conference happens every year. All the sessions are free on YouTube. Any aspect of tableau you want to learn about at any skill level, there’s basically free sessions/classes on it. I’ve found a lot of value “speed tipping” sessions, tons of them on YouTube. These are gold, just super quick tips and tricks, tons of them packed into a short time.
- see if there’s a local Tableau User Group (TUG). Those are a great place to meet other tableau developers, ask questions, and there’s usually presentations on how to do things etc. probably different in every area, but at least pre-covid these were well attended in my area sometimes with 100+ people.
That join us going to create data explosion, shift to using a relationship in your extracts and/or change how your entitlements table is populated (stuff usernames into one row with a delimiter, use something like contains(username(), useremail) as a data source filter).
Reasons a relationship will work better is that the tables are being queried separately at the physical layer, so not creating one big table.
If your entitlements table is a sql table, use the stuff function to stuff usernames into one row. Or use another tool to transform it from this:
1 | johndoe@email | fact a
2 | janedoe@email | fact a
3 | johndoe@email | fact b
To this:
1| johndoe@email, janedoe@email | fact a
2| johndoe@email | fact b
https://www.tableau.com/learn/whitepapers/row-level-security-entitlements-tables
This white paper also explains how to address join explosion.
No, you can keep both in the zoom extent.
I'm not talking about putting 2 sheets on top of each other. I'm talking about the feature called 'Map Layers'.
Most of the useful things in tableau require annoying hacks or duplicative calculated fields to pull off. Donuts are a great example.
My recollection is that tableau was born out an academic hatred for pie charts amongst other bad visualization practices (stacked bars do same thing as pies with more visual precision) but the eventually had to capitulate to business demands for pies. I have always been bewildered that they didn’t just implement donuts from the start, since donuts are effectively stacked bars that are bent into a circle - would still embody some of the initial driving principles behind tableau, while filling the role of “round thing for percentages”
My take on tableau is that it started as a collection of academically validated visualization ideas representing cutting edge thought leadership and best practices in the field, and then they had to compromise all of that for sales because the customer gets what it wants, even when it doesn’t know what it’s talking about. Adding pie charts four years after creation of the product was an early example, half baked forecasting and clustering is a even better, more recent example. https://www.tableau.com/about/blog/2021/12/analyzing-history-tableau-innovation
The Tableau Data Analyst Certification has been in the beta stage initially. The results take some time to announce, and Tableau also uses the results of candidates to optimize their exams. Many of the questions that have been used in the Tableau Data Analyst Beta exam will be changed and fine tuned for the final version of the Certification exam. Refer the Official Tableau Certification site for more details of the exam.
According to Tableau's own "designing efficient workbooks" (https://www.tableau.com/learn/whitepapers/designing-efficient-workbooks), you'll be faster with an embedded datasource, unless you have a rather bad PC and a powerhouse of a server. But the best way to be sure is to use performance recording.
I just edited the question to clarify, this is all in Tableau Server already.
With respect to the working with and publishing large extracts, sometimes you can't work with live connection locally (i.e. in desktop), or prefer to have an extract locally before you publish. I use a trick for this, here is one document. https://www.tableau.com/about/blog/2013/9/easy-empty-local-extracts-25152 Though I go a few steps further, and work locally with an extract that contains sample data. I then change a parameter, publish the tiny extract, then refresh on the server, which pulls the entire dataset.
Generally speaking as a whole tableau is very well documented and the forums will help you answer a lot of questions with a quick google (that community is more active than reddit imo)
Your understanding is for the most part correct though.
Q1- you can do both of the things you mention. tableau server can be used to house 'tableau data sources' which you can then connect to workbooks in desktop and it is also the place that the dashboards are uploaded.
Q2- this is the step im less familiar with but yes you can upload your flows to server and run them from there (https://help.tableau.com/current/prep/en-us/prep_conductor_publish_flow.htm) however in order to automatically schedule the flow to run you need the 'tableau prep conductor' add on https://www.tableau.com/en-gb/products/prep. You can output the data to server as a tableau datasource and connect to it in desktop as previously mentioned in Q1.
Q3- There will certainly be logic that allows you to dynamically bring in the last 30 days of data and automatically union it, probably using a wildcard union of some sort. Tableau prep is a viable way of doing this but many other tools could probably do the same thing i.e. alteryx or knime or sql.
The flow would look more like this Prep > data to Server > Create dashboards connecting to data on server > publish dashboards to server
Tableau does this really nicely, here are some examples
https://www.tableau.com/about/blog/2017/2/viz-variety-show-heatmaps-66330
Slightly more complicated: https://community.tableau.com/s/question/0D54T00000G54w3SAB/calendar-heatmap-without-breaks-between-months
On the open market, there are only two Tableau certifications out there
1) desktop specialist 2) data analyst
Go here to find out more about these including topics covered and sample questions - https://www.tableau.com/en-gb/learn/certification
The desktop specialist is an introductory certification to Tableau desktop and is aimed at folks who have started out in Tableau and want a basic certification under their belt. The data analyst encompasses wider topics like tableau server and tableau prep to get a deeper and wider breath of knowledge than the desktop specialist.
In terms of courses, I only use Udemy to cover my knowledge bases on the above certification but I'm sure there are other resources this community can provide including some nice YouTube channels.
Not to sound rude but I'd check out what's currently available from tableau https://www.tableau.com/en-gb/learn/training/20201
And from there just Google anything else you want.
I've used desktop, online and prep but just googled most of what I needed for specific things.
If you're not using it in your day to day job then look for sample data and just that.
Tableau Reader lets you read .twbx files containing extracts, and is free. Be careful about putting any proprietary or confidential data in an extract, because Tableau does not encrypt the file:
https://www.tableau.com/products/reader
Not sure I understand the second question.
Are you already using an extract? If it's time data, try to aggregate to a coarser level on extract creation. There's a boatload of things you can quickly optimize - I once got a 45 second query time to less than 0.5 seconds, a few optimizations really go a long way.
https://www.tableau.com/learn/whitepapers/designing-efficient-workbooks
While I recommend reading that one if you work with large amounts of data regularly, you can also skip to the performance flowchart directly to get tips on how to improve your workbook performance hands-on.
I’d recommend picking a topic you’re interested in and then find a dataset related to that. Your interest enables you to provide that extra context and analysis on the topic - especially useful if you’re asked to talk about the work.
Check out Tableau community projects for some inspiration, there’s a wide range of topic available: https://www.tableau.com/community/community-projects and Tableau Public’s discover page.
If you’re after specifically business dashboard check out the RWFD (Real World Fake Data) project, with loads of great looking dashboards on Tableau Public.
Outside of the capstone project you may want to look at the WOW (Workout Wednesday) challenges for your Tableau Public portfolio. These are more technical builds in Tableau but demonstrate your knowledge of the tool.
Best of luck for your project! Have some friends review the work or try getting a session with #VizOfficeHours (on Twitter)
Yes there are connectors. Also- if you’re using tableau online, there are pre made dashboards for salesforce data that you can try out. They won’t be perfect, but will help you identify what fields can do what etc- used this recently for client work to get started.
Sounds like you need to setup a blend... I would recommend joining in the data source over blending, but some situations necessitate separate source with a blend.
Change the name of the "variable that is present in DB X and Y" to the same name. (i.e., if the name is "Recordno" in DB X and "record_number" in DB Y, rename one so they match identically)
Then on your sheet, you should have a data source with a blue icon (primary) and an orange icon (secondary), go to the orange and find the RecordNo field. Click the link 🔗 icon so it turns red. This tells Tableau to "blend" on these fields.
Alternatively, you could use a Parameter (which is global) to filter both data sources at the same time. Filter with parameters
As someone else already mentioned, performance recordings are the go-to tool for developers looking for bottlenecks in their dashboards.
There used to be a tool called Tabjolt that could automate load testing, but it hasn't been updated in years and I don't know if it still works. With Tabjolt, you could run hundreds of requests, set maximum number of concurrent tests, and even define an 'interactivity' level (randomize pauses between clicks, click multiple UI elements as part of test, etc.). The end result is a dashboard showing test results, average load times, and resource utilization. However, this requires you to point to an existing server, which means your testing could impact overall server performance. The tool isn't easy to configure either. Check with your server admin team to see if they'll set it up and carve out testing windows.
Lastly, Tableau Server has some admin panels (only available to admins) that can show average load times for dashboards. Ask your sever management team for more details.
As a side note, the one thing most dashboard builders don't understand is that their dashboard will NEVER run faster on the server than it did on their Desktop development machine. If you're devs are saying "oh, it's slow here, but the server has more horsepower and it'll run faster there", you're going to have a bad time. That's simply not how the server works :).
Typically, I do all my data-prep outside of tableau (usually in SQL) and keep the number of tables/joins in Tableau to a minimum. If you don't have that option, you might try looking at Tableau Prep to help.
Tableau is not just a visualization tool, you can use it for a ton of use cases outside of visualization.
Anyways, check out TabPy (developed by Tableau)
https://github.com/tableau/TabPy
https://www.tableau.com/about/blog/2016/12/using-python-sentiment-analysis-tableau-63606
For the voice here.....https://www.tableau.com/learn/webinars/gain-competitive-advantage-understanding-voice-customer-ai
Don't have something publicly available that I can share. Sorry. One effective viz was a tree map that had the text categories and we were able to drop sentiment in color, so we can see the key themes and correlating sentiment. It was a filter to see the sentence text verbatim.
I got my start by 1) inheriting several dashboards and projects (reverse engineering their mess both helped and hurt. Lots of bad habits), having someone to ask questions to (learning a way, but not always the best way), and diving headlong into https://www.tableau.com/learn (general, foundational, and essential learning), and then to a lesser extent some content on YouTube (Andy Kriebel is the man), and Tableau Conference (revealed numerous tips and tricks).
I spent the first several weeks on the job doing an hour or more day of training each work day. Coming from an entirely unrelated field, I really appreciated the foundational tableau training. Sometimes it's hard to recall, but most of what I get asked from newer people at work now are basic concepts or functions they should have learned from tableau.com if they had a paid any attention. I can't emphasize enough the value of the free training tableau provides. The headaches and time you'll save learning all the basics will be worth the time invested. Watch every single free video they provide. (I have heard they trimmed back the free content over the years, but I can't imagine it removing any of the foundational stuff that I valued most)
If you aren't very tech savvy, I have a secondary option I've used which doesn't work that bad.
I used Google Sheets to pull in API data using this API Connector Add-On to run my API queries then connect to these as my data source from Tableau.
Since you have to build WDCs for mostly all APIs when using Tableau, this was my best work around especially not knowing Python.
You'll need to use some tricky VBA to accomplish this task. I found this online that seems to have a solution to this (among other things).. I've barely touched VBA, so I won't be of much help. So I hope it works for you, but, if not, hopefully someone else will be able to help.
Posted my spreadsheet to google drive here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2YntoxAqk1dc2JVNGxmdUJ0dzQ/edit?usp=sharing
You may need to hit file and download to view it, for some reason google sheets isn't liking it through the public link.
Hi There,
Thanks for reaching out and being open to getting some support! I'd be more than happy to help out in any way that I can and looking forward to hearing about your experience with Tableau.
We can either block off 60 or 75 minutes for the call. The full 75 minutes (15 + my 1 hour gift) or if you’re more time constrained we can fit it within an hour.
Here are the links to my calendar:
https://calendly.com/digitalmvmt/60-minute-meeting
https://calendly.com/digitalmvmt/75-minute-meeting
Looking forward to our chat!
Shahab
Hi There,
Thanks for reaching out and being open to getting some support! I'm looking forward to hearing about your journey and how I can help!
So two options...We can either block off 60 or 75 minutes for the call. The full 75 minutes (15 + my 1 hour gift) or if you’re more time constrained we can fit it within an hour.
Here are the links to my calendar:
https://calendly.com/digitalmvmt/60-minute-meeting
https://calendly.com/digitalmvmt/75-minute-meeting
Looking forward to our chat!
Shahab
> Why can’t I copy and paste? Whyyyy
Oh boy, you may love this - 2021.4 added the ability to copy and paste text boxes, images and web pages !
Your best course of action is to start of by taking a dashboard from a commonly used data source and run performance recording tool on it (In Tableau Desktop) and then see which part of the dashboard is taking a long time (ie, the query, transferring data, generating the actual viz, etc). Then you can determine which you should start optimizing.
In general, you want to bring in the least data possible if you are using a live connection, meaning connecting to a view on a data source, rather then the actual table and then running a query against it. Every environment is unique in terms of how it connects to data, where the data lies, the network latency, throughput, etc. So it's hard to give it a "one stop shop" answer.
Tableau also has performance whitepaper which you can reference for specific scenarios
https://www.tableau.com/learn/whitepapers/designing-efficient-workbooks
Beside the normal installation guide and working as an admin in real life - Mark Wu's content is great:https://www.tableau.com/community/blog/2021/4/zen-masters-guide-learning-tableau-server
Harder to find free content on Server and Admin training for free...
Essentially, what you are talking about is 'guided analytics'. Tableau Conferences usually have a section on this. Typically, 45 - 60 minutes and definitely worth watching. All three answers below are different ways to skin the cat. https://www.tableau.com/learn/webinars/visual-analytics-guided-analytics-anz-2021-10-21