In this post, we will go through the essential concept of data visualisation and Tableau skills from my experience.
Before the tutorial start, I would like to show you a picture. You can use your imagination to think about what you see. There is no specific answer to the picture. But I’ll share with you my opinion in the end.
Data Visualization Steps
There’re three main steps of data visualization.
- Who – Know who is your audience
- What – What action or knowledge that you want to share
- How – Use what data, how to transform and choose which type of chart to do visualization and verify the visualization result
The data and information should follow the action and knowledge as the pyramid shows. All the effort we do should toward the goal we want to achieve, isn’t it?
The following is an example from a famous data visualization book. It’s about a teaching program in science. The teacher hopes the people can keep supporting the program. So, he/she conducted a survey before and after the program to show the effect.
Two figures here. The left figure only shows the information in two pie charts. It’s really hard to know whether it has any effect if not check the detail of the chart. However, the right figure is very clear. More students are excited about science after the program. And it shows the conclusion, “Pilot program was a success”, at the top of the chart. Using a bar chart is good to compare things.
Tableau Products & Certification
A company usually uses a tableau desktop and tableau server. Tableau desktop is for developing a report and exploring the data. And tableau server is for sharing the result with the others in the organization through the website. For personal usage, tableau public is a good start for you. For more information, you can check the link.
And there are two certifications for a data analyst career path. Tableau Desktop Specialist and Tableau Certified Data Analyst. You can know more information here.
Fundamentals
Two important concepts of tableau you must know.
One is measure & dimension. Another one is continuous & discrete.
As the slide show, the measure is a dependent variable and the dimension is an independent variable. Continuous type is green colour and discrete type is blue.
IDE
Skills
Conclusion
When you excel in tableau and data visualization, you can use the nutrition of data to grow trees and flowers. In the end, you can create value for the world.
Reference
Sleeper, Ryan. Practical Tableau : 100 Tips, Tutorials, and Strategies from a Tableau Zen Master / Ryan Sleeper. First edition. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2018. Print.
Knaflic, Cole Nussbaumer. Storytelling with Data : a Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals / Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley, 2015. Print.