Creating Data Stories with Tableau Public

Book description

Illustrate your data in a more interactive and interesting way using Tableau Public

About This Book

  • Learn the basics of creating visualizations with Tableau using this concise reference book
  • Understand how to join and aggregate your data sources using Tableau
  • It is a step by step guide that uses examples to help you understand the key concepts and feature of Tableau Public

Who This Book Is For

This book is targeted at investigative journalists and bloggers with an interest in making rich and interactive data visualizations. Intermediate Tableau Public users and organizations can also use this book as a reference guide and teaching aid. Members of the media team, such as data specialists, web developers, editors, producers, and managers can also benefit from an understanding of the structure and challenges of writing an interactive and interesting data visualization using Tableau Public.

What You Will Learn

  • Connect to various data sources and understand what data is appropriate for Tableau Public
  • Understand chart types and when to use specific chart types with different types of data
  • Join and aggregate data for use in Tableau Public data stories
  • Discover features of Tableau Public, from basic to advanced
  • Involve calculations in Tableau Public
  • Build geographic maps to bring context to data
  • Create dashboards from one or more separate data visualizations
  • Create filters and actions to allow greater interactivity to Tableau Public visualizations and dashboards
  • Publish and embed Tableau visualizations and dashboards in articles

In Detail

Tableau Public is a very useful tool in anyone's data reporting toolbox that allows authors to add an interactive data element to any article. It allows investigative journalists and bloggers to tell a ?data story?, allowing others to explore your data visualization. The relative ease of Tableau Public visualization creation allows data stories to be developed rapidly. It allows readers to explore data associations in multiple-sourced public data, and uses state-of-the-art dashboard and chart graphics to immerse the users in an interactive experience.

This book offers investigative journalists, bloggers, and other data story tellers a rich discussion of visualization creation topics, features, and functions. This book allows data story tellers to quickly gain confidence in understanding and expanding their visualization-creation knowledge, and allows them to quickly create interesting, interactive data visualizations to bring a richness and vibrancy to complex articles.

The book takes you from basic concepts in visualization creation, like connecting to data sources, cleansing data, chart types, common functions, map creation, and publishing to the Web, to more advanced functions.

It is a great overview and reference guide for beginner to intermediate Tableau Public data story tellers, and covers creation of Tableau Public visualizations of varying complexities.

Style and approach

This book is a crisp, systematic, and tutorial-styled guide to building interactive Tableau visualizations.

Table of contents

  1. Creating Data Stories with Tableau Public
    1. Table of Contents
    2. Creating Data Stories with Tableau Public
    3. Credits
    4. About the Author
    5. Acknowledgments
    6. About the Author
    7. About the Reviewer
    8. www.PacktPub.com
      1. Support files, eBooks, discount offers, and more
        1. Why subscribe?
        2. Free access for Packt account holders
    9. Preface
      1. What this book covers
      2. What you need for this book
      3. Who this book is for
      4. Conventions
      5. Reader feedback
      6. Customer support
        1. Downloading the example code
        2. Downloading the color images of this book
        3. Errata
        4. Piracy
        5. Questions
    10. 1. Getting Started with Tableau Public
      1. A Tableau Public overview
      2. Telling your story with Tableau Public
      3. Installing Tableau Public
        1. Exploring Tableau Public
        2. Connecting to data
      4. Opening files and creating your profile
      5. Discover
      6. Exploring the visualizations of other authors
      7. Summary
    11. 2. Tableau Public Interface Features
      1. Touring the Tableau Public user interface
        1. The side bar
        2. The Data pane
        3. Visual cues
        4. The Analytics pane
        5. Menus and toolbars
        6. Canvas and Column/Row shelves
        7. Using the Columns and Rows shelves
      2. Using the Marks card
        1. The Filters and Pages shelves
        2. The workspace control tabs of Tableau Public
      3. The Show Me tool
      4. Summary
    12. 3. Connecting to Data
      1. Public data
      2. Tables and databases
      3. The data sources that Tableau Public connects to
      4. The databases, tables, dimensions, facts, field formats and conventions
      5. Connecting to the data in Tableau Public
        1. The data source user interface
        2. Using the data interpreter
        3. Pivoting data
        4. Filtering data sources
        5. Joining tables
        6. Connecting to web-based data sources
      6. Summary
    13. 4. Visualization – Tips and Types
      1. An overview of the development lifecycle
      2. Ten visualization tips
      3. The perception of visual clues
      4. Using the Show Me tool to create charts
      5. Answering questions using Show Me chart types
        1. About dimensions and measures
        2. Continuous and discrete dimensions and measures
        3. Selecting aggregation types for measures
        4. Swapping and sorting
      6. Types of visualization
        1. Line graphs
          1. Continuous versus discrete date-time elements
        2. Tables
        3. Bar charts
        4. Geographic maps
        5. Scatter plots
        6. Pie charts
        7. Using groups and sets
      7. Summary
    14. 5. Calculations
      1. Creating calculated fields
        1. Editing calculated fields
      2. Types of calculations
      3. The number functions
      4. The date functions
      5. Type conversions
      6. The string functions
      7. The aggregate functions
      8. The logic functions
      9. Blending data sources
      10. Summary
    15. 6. Level of Detail and Table Calculations
      1. About data sources
      2. Creating quick table calculations
      3. Changing over time
      4. Compute using
        1. Moving average
        2. Editing table calculations
      5. Manually editing table calculations
      6. Ranking
      7. Window versus running functions
        1. A note on addressing
      8. The level of detail calculations
        1. A FIXED LOD calculation
        2. The INCLUDE and nested LOD calculations
      9. Summary
    16. 7. Dashboard Design and Styling
      1. The dashboard design process
      2. Best practices for dashboard design
      3. Creating a dashboard
      4. The dashboard tab interface
        1. Layout objects
      5. Setting the size of dashboard elements
        1. Sizing the dashboard
        2. Building a dashboard
      6. Summary
    17. 8. Filters and Actions
      1. Adding and using Filters
        1. Adding Filters to worksheets
        2. Adding Quick Filters to a dashboard
          1. Moving the Quick Filter
      2. Filtering across Data sources with parameters
        1. Using parameters as Filters
          1. Modifying titles
        2. Filtering across multiple Data sources with parameters
      3. Actions
      4. URL actions
      5. Summary
    18. 9. Publishing Your Work
      1. Saving your work and logging in to Tableau Public
      2. Opening work from the Cloud
      3. Managing your profile
      4. Viewing your work online
      5. Managing workbook details
      6. Summary
    19. Index

Product information

  • Title: Creating Data Stories with Tableau Public
  • Author(s): Ashley Ohmann, Matt Floyd
  • Release date: November 2015
  • Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
  • ISBN: 9781849694766