Tableau: An Insightful Business Analysis Tool

Many Business Intelligence and data visualization tools entered the market to make interactive dashboards to visualize business data. Tableau is an example of a tool to create interactive dashboards. Tableau allows us to understand data. A good way to understand our data is to visualize our data. That makes data visualization an important aspect of business analytics. Nowadays, many companies use Business Intelligence Tools to understand their data and gain valuable information from data to better understand their business. Tableau is a fast-evolving tool that is used in many companies. Like Power Bi, Tableau is easy to learn and fast to deploy.  

Connect to Data

When opening the Tableau software, you have numerous options to connect and import data from different sources. For example, you can connect with Microsoft Excel files, text or CSV files, pdf files, but you can also connect to a server, such as Oracle or MySQL. The data connection will be visible in the ‘Data Source’ sheet. You can use the ‘Data Interpreter’ to clean your text files or workbooks. Aside from using the ‘Data Interpreter’ to clean your data, you can filter your data on specific criteria.

Case Study: Weather in Australia

At Kaggle, I found a nice dataset about the weather in Australia. Before you start using Tableau, you should sign up and download the Tableau software first. There is a free trial period for 14-days. I loaded the data into Tableau. You can add as many connections as you want, including connections of various file types. I add the CSV file I have downloaded from Kaggle to the connections and I include a text file containing geospatial data of well-known Australian cities and villages. In the data source table, you can modify the data types, for example, a numeric data type, a string (text) data type, or a date. Also, you can add a filter to the data. I selected ‘Location’ in the add filter command. From here, you can select the data of Australian cities and villages you want to have.

DATA MODELLING IN TABLEAU

After adding a data connection from different data sources, you can build relationship models. Drag the data to the template to relate them. Additionally, the software allows us to join tables. The type of file does not matter to join tables. For example, you can join two tables in which one connection is an Excel file and the other connection is a text file. In the Australian Weather case study, I join the CSV file and the text file. There are multiple ways to join data, including inner join, left join, right join, or full join. Building relationship models could be useful in production organizations or in organizations in which products are made to order. Here’s an example.

Presenting your data

Data visualization is an excellent way to gain informative insights from data. There are many ways to visualize data and build a dashboard. You can, for example, present your data in a table, a bar chart, a pie chart, a map, or you can create a line plot.

Case Study: Weather in Sydney and Melbourne Averages

Also, you can create a chart with two y-axes and one x-axis. For example, I created a bar plot with the average rainfall for both Sydney and Melbourne. In addition, I added the average minimum and maximum temperature in each month. The numbers on the y-axis on the left are the numbers that include the amount of average rainfall. The numbers on the y-axis on the right display the temperature in degrees Celsius.

Geospatial Data Visualization

Aside from standard data visualization, you can visualize geographically related data. For example, how many covid-19 cases are there in each state of the us this month. Another example, what is the average amount of rainfall in Australian cities in March. Often, geospatial data is displayed in a choropleth map. The larger the number, the darker the color in the map.

The map shows the covid-19 cases in the US. As you can see, California, Texas, New York state, and Florida have the highest number of covid-19 cases. This data was retrieved from Kaggle, and it contains data till October 2020.

Also, you can display geospatial data in a bubble plot. The larger the ‘bubble’, the larger the number. For example, Australian cities, such as Darwin and Cairns, have a reasonable amount of rainfall around this time of the year. The average rainfall in March is lower in cities, such as Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth.

Making a Dashboard

The dashboard sheet in Tableau enables it to make a dashboard including all graphical data. Let’s create a dashboard of the Australian Weather in sheet ‘Dashboard’. What is the average rainfall in Australia in a year? You can add a filter to the data and add a slicer to the dashboard. In the case study, I added ‘month’ to the dashboard. You can select the average rainfall in Australian cities by month. The size of the bubbles change when selecting another month. The dashboard is created so that it matches the size of an iPad screen.