What is Tableau?
Tableau is a data analytics and business intelligence platform which is flexible and easy to use ensuring a smooth experience to the users. The main pillars of strength for Tableau are interactive dashboards, quick responsiveness, and real-time data analysis. Also, it offers a wide range of eye-catching graphics or visualizations to represent your data set pictorially like charts and graphs.
Basically, Tableau provides all the capabilities that we require for a successful data analysis like data extraction, processing, representing/visualizing and sharing the final reports/dashboards/worksheets with others.
What are the main features of Tableau?
The reason behind Tableau gaining immense popularity in little time is its attractive set of features and functionalities. Some key features of Tableau are:
- Drag-and-drop functionality
- Range of native data connectors
- Data highlights and filters
- Share dashboards
- Dashboard embedding
- Mobile-ready dashboards
- Data notifications
- Tableau Reader (for data viewing)
- Dashboard commenting
- Creating “no-code” data queries
- Queries to visualization conversions
- Import data of all sizes
- Creating interactive dashboards
- Creating guided stories
- Metadata management
- Automatic updates
- Security permissions at any level
- Tableau Public for data sharing
- Server REST API
- ETL refresh. For more info Tableau Training
Can you explain the Tableau design flow?
The design or logic flow in Tableau is as follows:
- Connecting to the data source through the connectors available in Tableau.
- Create data views, that is, creating visualizations like charts, graphs, etc.
- Enhancing the data views using advanced Tableau methods.
- Creating different worksheets so that we can have different data views from the same or different data.
- After worksheets, we can create dashboards that are organizing different and relevant data views in a single view for reporting.
- Using these dashboards or workbooks we can create stories to express the language of data better.
How is the Context Filter different from other Filters?
- Whenever we create a Context Filter, Tableau will create a temporary table for this particular Filter set and other Filters will be applied on the Context Filter data like cascade parameters.
- Suppose, we have created a Context Filter on countries, USA and India, Tableau will create a temporary table for these two countries’ data and if we have any other Filters other will be applied on these two countries’ data if we don’t have any Context Filter, each record will check for all Filters.
What is the disadvantage of Context Filters?
- The Context Filter is not frequently changed by the user—if the Filter is changed, the database must be recomputed and the temporary table has to be rewritten, slowing performance.
- When we set a dimension to context, Tableau creates a temporary table that will require a reload each time the view is initiated. For Excel, Access, and text data sources, the temporary table created is in an Access table format.
- For SQL Server, MySQL, and Oracle data sources, we must have permission to create a temporary table on our server.
- For a multidimensional data source, or cubes, temporary tables are not created, and Context Filters defined which Filters are independent and which are dependent. Tableau Advanced Training. Learn more Tableau Advanced Training
What is aggregation and disaggregation of data?
Suppose, we have data like below:
Eid Ename Salary Dept
1.abc 2000 java
2.bbc 3000 .net
3.Krishna 2500 java
Madhu 300
5.Vamshi 3000 mainframes
1.abc 1000 testing
2.bbc 3000 tableau
3.krishna 5000.net
4.Madhu 7000 testing
vanshi 9000 tableau
1 abc 11000 Mainframes
2 bbc 13000testing
3 krishna 15000 java
4 Madhu 17000 .nte
5 vamshi 19000.net
Aggregation: To display aggregate data
Sum/avg salary by each individual employee
Drag ename on column and salary on rows, and we will get the sum (salary) of each and individual employee
Now, change the measure type as Avg
Choose salary option: choose measure types as ‘Avg’
Disaggregation: To display each and every transaction
When we look at the aggregated data in the views above, each bar represents all transactions for a specific employee summed up or averaged into a single value. Now, say, we want to see the individual salary transactions for each employee. We can create a view like that by selecting Analysis > Aggregate Measures.
What are the different Tableau Products and what is the latest version of Tableau?
Here is the Tableau Product family.
(i)Tableau Desktop:
It is a self service business analytics and data visualization that anyone can use. It translates pictures of data into optimized queries. With tableau desktop, you can directly connect to data from your data warehouse for live upto date data analysis. You can also perform queries without writing a single line of code. Import all your data into Tableau’s data engine from multiple sources & integrate altogether by combining multiple views in a interactive dashboard. Learn more skills from Tableau Server Training
(ii)Tableau Server:
It is more of an enterprise level Tableau software. You can publish dashboards with Tableau Desktop and share them throughout the organization with web-based Tableau server. It leverages fast databases through live connections.
(iii)Tableau Online:
This is a hosted version of Tableau server which helps makes business intelligence faster and easier than before. You can publish Tableau dashboards with Tableau Desktop and share them with colleagues.
(iv)Tableau Reader:
It’s a free desktop application that enables you to open and view visualizations that are built in Tableau Desktop. You can filter, drill down data but you cannot edit or perform any kind of interactions.
(v)Tableau Public:
This is a free Tableau software which you can use to make visualizations with but you need to save your workbook or worksheets in the Tableau Server which can be viewed by anyone. Get more advanced and server skills from Tableau Server Online Training
What are Measures and Dimensions?
Measures are the numeric metrics or measurable quantities of the data, which can be analyzed by dimension table. Measures are stored in a table that contain foreign keys referring uniquely to the associated dimension tables. The table supports data storage at atomic level and thus, allows more number of records to be inserted at one time. For instance, a Sales table can have product key, customer key, promotion key, items sold, referring to a specific event.
Dimensions are the descriptive attribute values for multiple dimensions of each attribute, defining multiple characteristics. A dimension table ,having reference of a product key form the table, can consist of product name, product type, size, color, description, etc.
Define story in Tableau?
Story can be defined as a sheet which is a collection of series of worksheets and dashboards used to convey the insights of data. Story can be used to show the connection between facts and outcomes that impacts the decision-making process. A story can be published to the web or can be presented to the audience.
Give an overview for fact and dimension of the table?
Facts are numeric measures of data. They are stored in fact tables. Fact tables store that type of data which will be analyzed by dimension tables. Fact tables have foreign keys associating with dimension tables.
Dimensions are descriptive attributes of data. Those will be stored in dimensions table. For example, customer’s information like name, number, and email will be stored in dimension table.
To get in-depth knowledge, enroll for a live free demo on Tableau Online Training
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