Tableau is a popular visual analytics platform that helps data professionals simplify raw data into a format that can be easily accessed and understood by a wide audience. Tableau has tools for creating customized worksheets and dashboards and has a range of uses across industries and professions, from data science to data analytics to business intelligence. Data visualizations created in Tableau can be used to depict key data findings, such as trends, outliers, and other values that can then be used to fuel the organization’s decision-making process. If you are unsure whether learning Tableau is right for you, consider reading on to learn more about the myriad uses of Tableau tools and techniques. Not only will learning Tableau open up a number of new career opportunities, but it also has various potential personal uses.

What is Tableau? 

Tableau is a data visualization tool. This software can simplify raw data into an accessible dashboard format that incorporates visual depictions of raw data, which can then be understood by various professionals working within a company.

Tableau provides features for real-time analysis, data blending, and collaboration capabilities. It allows Data Analysts to manipulate live datasets and devote their efforts more to analysis rather than data wrangling. Because Tableau doesn’t require programming or technical skills, it’s an accessible tool for data analytics.

Read more about what Tableau is and why you should learn it.

Professional Uses for Tableau

The amount of data being created each day around the globe is increasing at a fast pace. Because so much of this data is now available to organizations, it’s essential for them to work with analytics tools like Tableau to find insights in these datasets and create visualizations to share their findings. Tableau is used by a range of top companies, such as Facebook, General Motors, Sony, and Groupon. It is relied on by Data Analysts, Business Analysts, Software Engineers, and Data Scientists, among other professionals, for data analysis and visualization, among other tasks. The following sections will explore some of the main uses for Tableau across professions:

Analyzing Data

Tableau provides a range of data analytics options. In particular, this program can perform four types of data analytics: descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive. Descriptive analytics strives to answer the question, “What happened?” It explores historical data to unearth patterns that can elucidate the current state of matters within an organization. Tableau’s diagnostic analytics capabilities seek to answer, ”Why did it happen?” This analytics branch searches for data patterns and connections within the numbers to help Data Analysts determine why a business condition exists and what’s needed to address it. Predictive analytics is involved with the future and answering the question, “What happens if?” It has applications in situations like risk assessment, weather forecasting, and sports analytics. Prescriptive analytics searches for the “how” that’s needed to remedy a problem or achieve a specific outcome. It requires coming up with various options and weighing their implications. Tableau is a powerful tool that allows Data Analysts to find answers to all these driving questions and more.

Visualizing Data

Tableau is a powerful tool for visualizing data. This program’s drag-and-drop interface provides an easy way for users to transform raw data into business insights and to depict it in an accessible format through a data visualization dashboard. Tableau users can select from a range of data visualization options, such as line charts, pie charts, scatter plots, histograms, and heat maps. Not only are these visual data representations visually engaging, but they also tell a larger story about the information. Data visualizations invite audience members into the data so they can see for themselves any trends, outliers, or patterns in the numbers. By visually conveying this information, decision-makers can leverage the data within the organization to achieve a specific outcome.

Communicating Data Findings

Not only is Tableau a popular application for analyzing and visualizing data, but it’s also great for collaboration. Often, data professionals work within a team and must keep team members abreast of their progress and insights. Their findings will eventually need to be communicated to a larger audience, such as other teams within their organization, managers, or external stakeholders. Tableau provides various collaborative tools that allow users to share projects, workbooks, data sources, views, and metrics. They can share this information directly with others or can link to the important content. Tableau users can also copy and embed code on a webpage to share views and metrics.

Automating Tasks

Although Tableau’s most commonly known as a data analysis and visualization tool, it also has many other uses. One such use is its range of automation capabilities that can streamline the analytics process. Many Data Analysts create similar-looking data visualizations as part of their daily tasks. Those who do so on a regular basis can use Tableau’s automation features to greatly reduce the time needed to do so. First, Tableau users must ensure the data is formatted correctly. They then update the data ranges so the new visualization will reflect this new data. Automation also helps Tableau users create calculated fields to update data ranges whenever an addition or change is incorporated into the source.

Other Uses for Tableau

In addition to its many uses in a professional setting, Tableau can also be used outside the job context. The following sections will briefly explore some of the ways Tableau can be used outside the job context to help users complete personal projects. 

Animating Visualizations

One of Tableau’s lesser-known features is its capability for animating visualizations. With the help of this software’s Page Shelf feature, Tableau users can design their own animated data visualizations. These interactive visuals can be used to present any information in a format that’s interactive and easy to access, even by a general audience.

Completing Community Projects

Tableau’s Community Projects page is a great resource for those who’d like to learn data visualization skills alongside their peers from around the globe. The Tableau Community provides a platform for those interested in learning to visualize data to practice their skills and share them with others. This free platform helps aspiring Data Analysts and others create and share their data visualizations with others in the biggest data visualization repository in existence. This page is especially useful for those seeking inspiration for their own data visualizations or interested in seeing how others around the world depict data findings. It’s also an excellent way to create an online portfolio you can then use to apply for data-related positions.

Monitoring Health-Related Concerns

Tableau has a range of applications in the healthcare industry for charting disease progression, keeping track of patient records, and visualizing vaccination rates across the country or world. You don’t have to be a healthcare professional to use this application to monitor your personal health. Any data you’ve kept over the years, such as a record of seasonal illness, prescriptions and vaccinations you’ve had, can all be recorded and visualized using Tableau. 

Storytelling

Until it’s analyzed and visualized, data is just numbers. Those who know how to transform these numbers into a story have the power to communicate with a broader audience, as well as to draw connections between seemingly unrelated data. When working in Tableau, a sequence of visualizations can work together to depict information. You can then devise a narrative that provides context, make a case, or indicate how a given decision leads to different outcomes.

Many data professionals use Tableau’s range of storytelling capabilities when presenting data findings to stakeholders and decision-makers at work. You can also tell a data-driven story outside of work. Doing so allows you to connect facts to one another, indicate how various decisions relate to outcomes and illustrate how past endeavors can be used to tell a story about the present. 

Various story points can be based on different views or dashboards, or you can use one visualization to depict the story at different stages using filters and annotations. Once you’ve created a story in Tableau, you can share it with others as a presentation or publish it online. You can also publish a workbook to Tableau Server, Tableau Public, or Tableau Cloud, which allows users to interact with the story and even pose their own data-related questions.

Learn Tableau Skills with Noble Desktop

Noble Desktop provides several great Tableau learning opportunities. For those new to Tableau, Noble’s Tableau Bootcamp is a program that teaches students the fundamental components of data visualization. Those enrolled explore Tableau Public’s different tools to connect to datasets, analyze, filter, and structure the data to make visualizations.

For those seeking a more rigorous learning environment for learning Tableau, Noble Desktop’s Data Analytics Certificate is a great option that covers data analytic skills, languages, and programs, such as SQL, Excel, and Python. Expert instructors ensure that those enrolled receive training to become Data Analysts or Business Analysts. One-on-one mentoring is provided for all students.

In addition, for those interested in learning more about Tableau, Noble’s Tableau Resources page has more than 50 articles to help you learn more about this powerful data visualization tool.

Key Takeaways

• Tableau is a popular data analytics and visualization tool used by organizations of all sizes and types to find relevant data insights.
• Visualizing data with Tableau is used in various professions, from data science to data analytics to business analytics. This powerful tool can also automate tasks and communicate data findings with other internal and external stakeholders.
• Tableau can also be used for personal creative projects, such as animating data visualizations, completing community projects, monitoring personal health, and storytelling.
• If you’re interested in learning more about Tableau and data visualization, comprehensive training options are available through Noble Desktop, either in person or online.