Data is the lifeblood of any organization; that’s why companies collect so much of it. Unfortunately, most data collected from diverse sources comes in raw form and, therefore, cannot be easily interpreted for analytics and business intelligence.
That’s where data visualization tools like Tableau come in. Tableau offers an easy way to visualize data. With an assortment of revolutionary features and tools, Tableau can effectively analyze complex raw data and generate easily skimmable, intuitive reports.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at Tableau, evaluating everything from what it is, its various features and capabilities, and the benefits it provides.
What Is Tableau?
Tableau is a top-of-the-line business intelligence and data visualization tool that allows users to analyze complex data easily. It also comes equipped with a suite of features that enable it to display data reports in a visually appealing, interactive way. This, coupled with its user-friendly interface and ease of use, makes it a popular choice for individuals and organizations in different industries.
What’s even more impressive is Tableau doesn’t just connect and analyze a single data type. It can connect to multiple data sources, including cloud servers, spreadsheets, and databases. Users can, therefore, seamlessly import and integrate data from diverse sources, facilitating comprehensive reporting and analysis.
Features of Tableau
There are countless business intelligence tools out there. What makes Tableau stand out are its impressive features and capabilities that facilitate seamless data analysis, reporting, and visualization.
Some of the most note-worthy features of Tableau include:
Interactive Dashboards
Effective data visualization doesn’t just involve looking at the data. To understand and make use of the information presented, you must also be able to interact with the data. Tableau enables users to create interactive dashboards that enhance data visualization. With Tableau, you can filter, drill down, and explore data dynamically. This feature enables you to gain real-time insights.
Drag-and-Drop Interface
The drag-and-drop feature has been around since the ’70s when it was a key feature of the Macintosh’s graphical user interface. However, this earlier version didn’t accommodate complex data types like unstructured raw data. It could only handle text and image documents.
This means that users had to rely on complex coding and scripting techniques when visualizing complex data. Fast forward a few decades, and Tableau found a way to incorporate the feature into data visualization techniques.
With Tableau, users can simply drag and drop data fields to create maps, graphs, and charts effortlessly. This feature makes it a reliable, easy-to-use, and time-saving tool.
Powerful Visual Analytics
When it will comes to visualizing data, the task is not just to make it visible and somewhat skimmable; you also have to make it visually appealing and easy to understand. Tableau features multiple data visualization techniques, including scatter plots, bar charts, heat maps, doughnut charts, and much more.
Additionally, users can combine and customize different visual elements to create informative and compelling data representations.
Collaboration and Sharing
Collaboration is extremely valuable in any department or organization. By sharing pertinent information on a project and delegating duties in a unified platform, businesses are better able to achieve their goals faster and more effectively.
Tableau allows users to share reports and interactive dashboards with others. Users can even publish their visualizations to Tableau Public or Tableau server platforms. This feature makes it easier to share insights across the entire organization.
Data Connection and Integration
When it comes to business intelligence, data flexibility is key. To achieve the necessary level of flexibility, businesses must be able to integrate data from multiple sources, analyze it, and present it in a unified representation.
That’s exactly what you get with Tableau. Tableau can connect to different data sources, including external servers and cloud storage. Users can then easily import and integrate multiple data sources, which ultimately facilitates more comprehensive analysis.
Benefits of Tableau
Here are some of the most notable benefits of Tableau:
Impressive Performance
The average company manages 162.9TB of data. That’s enough to overwhelm most data analysis tools, causing them to lag or even crash. However, Tableau is built to accommodate a lot of data. It has a powerful data engine that enables it to connect to multiple data sources without affecting its performance.
Tableau also features augmented analytics tools that allow multiple users with different skill sets to perform data cleaning and visualization tasks simultaneously.
Community Support
Community support is a vital resource in the tech sector. Tableau has a huge community of business analysts and data scientists that can help you easily find solutions to problems you may encounter when using Tableau. There’s also a wealth of resources in community forums like GitHub.
Automation Functionality
Automation helps save time and human resources. With Tableau, users can create processing metrics and apply the same formula to different visualizations. For instance, you can create a field for each data source and apply a different formula for all rows containing data from each source. This makes it incredibly easy to create visuals when dealing with multiple data sources.
Revolutionize Your Data Visualization Strategy With Tableau
Tableau is arguably one of the most feature-intensive and high-performing data analytics and visualization tools on the market. It can handle multiple data types from diverse sources and integrate them into a single, interactive representation for effective business intelligence gathering.
Besides the features mentioned above, Tableau comes equipped with various other features and capabilities, including a free version that enables anyone to create and publish visualizations on the web.