Tableau Resources

Getting started in Tableau

Using Tableau Online – a full feature online workbook editor that is contained entirely in the browser.

Step 1: Account setup

You’ll need to create a Tableau account (if you don’t already have one), then use the link to navigate to the course’s page.

Step 2: Navigate to the data

With a successful login, you should see something similar to the following.

Click the default project, then click on the “Data Sources” tab.

To create a new workbook, click the “…” to the right of the data file, and select “New Workbook”.

Done! You can now create new sheets and dashboards (organized collections of sheets) by clicking the buttons at the bottom of the workbook.

Tableau’s graphics grammar is very similar to R’s graphics grammar. In Tableau, you are not specifying a specific “chart type” like you would in Excel. Instead, you are mapping variables to different geometries and aesthetics, called “Marks” in Tableau. To map a variable to a Mark, just drag and drop it from the left column to the desired Mark.

Tableau has two main types of variables: Dimensions (blue) and Measures (green). By default, Tableau treats any field containing qualitative, categorical information as a “Dimension”, and any numeric (quantitative) variable as a “Measure”. For an overview of potential graphs with this data, click the “Show Me” button in the upper right hand corner of the workbook.

Ending where we started… with 10 Graphs

Q1. A bar graph showing how the mean of a continuous variable changes across different levels of a categorical variable.

Q2. A bar graph showing how the total of a continuous variable changes across different levels of a different categorical variable.

Q3. A line graph summarizing a variable over a date variable

Q4. A scatter plot showing the relationship between any two continuous measures

Q5. A scatter plot showing the relationship between any two continuous measures, with a third (categorical variable) mapped to the color mark

Q6. A bar graph showing how the average of a continuous variable varies across two distinct categorical variables

Q7. A histogram of a continuous variable

Q8. A plot that uses the “size” Mark

Q9. A polygon map showing total box office by franchise, where colors denote different genres

Q10. Something else you haven’t done!

Bonus. Add your four favorites to a dashboard.