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Tableau Behind The Scenes

Revealing what’s going on while you play with your data

Lore So What
Towards Data Science
5 min readJan 27, 2022

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Image by Wavebreak from Shutterstock

Tableau is an incredible tool that empowers everyone to see and understand their data. And this can be done in seconds, with its distinguishing drag and drop feature, which allows to quickly discover trends and outliers.

And even if you have been using Tableau for quite some time, it is still not quite obvious what exactly is happening when we start playing with our data.

In this article, I will try to explain Tableau’s behind the scenes with 4 practical examples and, more importantly, how to apply these concepts to bring your Tableau skills to the next level.

So, what happens behind the scenes?

Essentially, Tableau is a SQL interface which means that when we open its blank canvas and start dragging and dropping dimensions and measures into the view, Tableau in the background is writing queries for us to pull the data and deliver our desired analysis.

The way to better understand this concept is by using a tool called Tableau Log Viewer (TLV), which provides a real-time view of the queries that are automatically generated by Tableau while we build our charts. In case you are interested in trying it out yourself, TLV is a free tool, available to download here

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Towards Data Science
Towards Data Science

Published in Towards Data Science

Your home for data science and AI. The world’s leading publication for data science, data analytics, data engineering, machine learning, and artificial intelligence professionals.

Lore So What
Lore So What

Written by Lore So What

👨‍💻 Data Analytics Lead @ Amazon by day 🎥 Data Science YouTuber by night 📩 Reach out to me at loresowhat@gmail.com

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