Make your first interactive Tableau dashboard in just 15 minutes

5 min readJul 26, 2022

(Short Tutorial)

Tableau Introduction

First of all, let’s talk about what is Tableau. Tableau is a leading data visualization tool used for data analysis and business intelligence, helping data professionals simplify raw data in a very clean and detailed format. Tableau is so popular, interactive, simple, fast and user-friendly and has a huge fan base in public and enterprise world. The great thing about tableau is that it doesn’t need any technical or any kind of programming skills to operate. It has accumulated interest among the people across various sectors like different industries, business, and researchers.

Features of Tableau are:

Real-time analysis
Collaboration of data
Data Blending

Tableau History

Tableau was founded in 2003 by Pat Hanrahan, Christian Chabot, and Chris Stolte from Standford University. The main idea behind its creation is to make the database industry interactive and comprehensive.

Since the time it was launched it was not accepted by the IT professionals as they did not find it worthwhile. But soon it picked up the pace when business analysts and marketers found its features useful for the business intelligence domain. The company launched its first IPO in 2013 and raised $250 million and never looked back.

In August 2016, Tableau announced the appointment of Adam Selipsky as president and CEO, effective September 16, 2016, replacing co-founder Christian Chabot as CEO.

In June 2018, Tableau acquired Empirical Systems, a Cambridge, Massachusetts based artificial intelligence startup, with plans to integrate the company’s technology into the Tableau platform. Tableau also announced plans to establish an office in Cambridge as a result of the deal.

On June 10, 2019, Tableau was acquired by Salesforce in an all stock deal worth over $15 billion.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Tableau

Before going into the details, let’s see the advantages and disadvantages of Tableau in a comparison form.

Advantages of Tableau:

High Performance
Apart from its high visualization functionality, users rate its overall performance as robust and reliable. The tool also operates fast even on big data, which makes its powerful performance an important point in the list of the advantages of Tableau.
No prior programming knowledge is needed
Users without relevant experience can start immediately with creating visualizations using Tableau
It can connect to several data sources that other BI tools do not support
Tableau enables users to create reports by joining and blending different datasets.
Mobile-friendly
There is an accomplished mobile app available for IOS and Android which adds mobility to Tableau users and allows them to keep statistics at their fingertips. The app supports practically that a desktop and online version has.
Extensive Customer Resources
Tableau community is engaging and enthusiastic. It has various comprehensive online resources, guides, training, and online forums, etc.

Disadvantages of Tableau:

Tableau cannot work with uncleaned data
In order to efficiently use Tableau, we need to do proper data cleaning in the underlying database first.
No Automatic Refreshing of Reports
Users don’t get an automatic option to refresh the reports with the help of scheduling. So the data must be manually updated via back-end whenever it gets change.
No Version Control
Once the dashboards and reports are published on the server you can’t get back to the previous levels of data in Tableau. It is not possible to go back and recover old data.

Tableau Short Tutorial

Load Data

Firstly, load the data to Tableau. If your file is is text file, click Text File on the left bar and open the data. On this example, we use data covid19 time series.

Create New Worksheet

On the left down corner tab, You can add new worksheet and rename it.

Simple Map Visualizing

Drag the table that you want to visualize on the worksheet. You can filter the data by its column. On the example, we have 2 data (Country and Province) and we choose province. Then, drag the data that you want it to be the value to count (drag to the right-side of your filtered data).

On this example, we want to see the sum of new cases per province.

Change Maps Color

If you want to change the map color, double click on it and select the palette.

Edit Label Marks

Click on the label that you want to change its look. Choose the color on the color blocks. To highlight its value, drag the variable value and change its look from tabular to only total sum (click “show me” on the top right corner), upsize it by double click it and go to “Marks” panel, choose “Text”, change the size.

#this is for New Cases variable