Tableau Advance Course

Audience
 Beginner to intermediate Tableau users.
 Anyone who works with data – regardless of technical or analytical
background.

Duration: 40 Hours
Prerequisites: Basic knowledge of SQL, DW concepts & Basic statistical
concepts.
Course type: Classroom sessions and hands on experience, PoC
implementation

9/2/2015 1
What is Data Visualization

Data visualization is the graphical presentation of information,

with the goal of providing viewer with a qualitative
understanding and communicate information clearly.

9/2/2015 2
Elements of Visualization

Data: Without data nothing can be proved or disproved (Action needs Data!)

View: Best way to analyze data and trust it is to visualize it (Seeing is

Believing!)

Discovery of Patterns: visually discoverable trends, outliers, clusters etc.

which form the basis of the story and follow-up actions

Story: The Story (based on that Data) is the trigger for the actions (Story
shows the Value!)

Action(s): Start with drilldown to a needle in haystack, embed data

visualization into business, it is not an eye candy but a practical way to
improve the business

9/2/2015 3
What is Dashboard

Dashboard is an easy to read, often single page, real-time user

interface visual display of the most important information
needed showing a graphical presentation of the current status &
historical trends to enable instantaneous and informed decisions
to be made at a glance.

9/2/2015 4
What is Tableau

Tableau is business intelligence software that allows anyone to

easily connect to data, then visualize and create interactive,
sharable dashboards.

It's easy enough that any Excel user can learn it, but powerful
enough to satisfy even the most complex analytical problems.

9/2/2015 5
Tableau Products

9/2/2015 6
Tableau Public Features

• Connectivity : TDE, Access, Excel, Text File

• Distribution : Cloud
• Automation : Not available
• Security : None – your data is accessible by anyone on the Internet
• Price: Free
• Tableau Public has a limit of 10 million rows of data that is allowed in any
single connection.
• Each account holder will be able to save up to 10 gigabyte (GB) of content
to Tableau Public
Best for
• Journalists
• Sharing publicly available data (and Tableau know-how) with the world
• Practicing Tableau for free
• Trying the software
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Tableau Desktop - Personal Features

• Connectivity: TDE, Access, Excel, Text File

• Distribution: Offline or Tableau Public
• Automation: Not available
• Security: As good as your personal computer / server’s security
• Price: $1000 for year one; $200 from 2nd year

Best for
• Those that only need to connect to flat data files
• Those that need the most cost-effective version that will keep their data
private

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Tableau Desktop - Professional Features

• Connectivity: All possible connections in Tableau

• Distribution: Offline, Tableau Server, or Tableau Public (all possible
distribution options in Tableau)
• Automation: Not available
• Security: As good as your personal computer / server’s security
• Price: $2000 for year one; $400 from 2nd year

Best for
• Those that need to connect to data in databases
• Those that need the capability to publish to Tableau Server

9/2/2015 9
Tableau Server Features

• Connectivity: Workbooks that have been published to Tableau

Server and that you have been granted access to
• Distribution: Tableau Server (cloud)
• Automation: Available on schedules or intervals
• Security: As good as your hosting provider’s
• Price: $1000 for year one; $200 from 2nd year; 10 license minimum

Best for
• Those that need to access / distribute workbooks in the cloud
• Those that want to automate workbook refreshes
• Those that want to edit workbooks in the cloud (limited capability)

9/2/2015 10
How Tableau Works

9/2/2015 11
Tableau Server Architecture

9/2/2015 12
Tableau File Types

9/2/2015 13
Tableau Data Blending

9/2/2015 14
Types of Dashboards

Strategic Dashboard

Analytical Dashboard

Operational Dashboard

9/2/2015 15
Strategic Dashboard

Objectives:
 Focus on high level
measure of
performance
 Typically display
static snapshots of
daily, weekly, or
monthly data
 Little user
interaction

Target Users:
Decision Makers, Sr.
Management etc.
Do not put too much details
9/2/2015 16
Analytical Dashboard

Objectives:
 Comparatively more
complex data with
rich comparisons
 Extensive historical
data
 Interactive display

Target Users:
Mid Management,
Planning Team

Includes more details, patterns, trends & complex relationships

9/2/2015 17
Operational Dashboard

Objectives:
 For monitoring
activities that are
constantly changing
 To show real time of
near real time data
 Requires quick and
responsive actions

Target Users:
Operational Workers

Extremely simple & direct display of information

9/2/2015 18
Levels of Dashboards

Section 1 Details

Summary Section 2 Details

Section 3 Details

9/2/2015 19
What is Good Visualization

It is a representation of data that helps you see what

you otherwise would have been blind to if you looked
only at the naked source. It enables you to see trends,
patterns and outliers.

9/2/2015 20
What Leads to Poor Adaptation of Dashboards

 Bad Data
 Lack of Actionable Insight
 Information Overload
 Ineffective use of visualization
 Lack of flexibility and interactivity
 Longer time to insight

9/2/2015 1121
Points to Consider For Dashboard Designing

 Purpose
Why are you doing this visualization?
 Content
What are you trying to visualize?
 Structure
How are you going to visualize it?
How do we best reveal the most important data and relationships?
 Formatting
How will it look and feel? How will it be consumed?
Formatting is the icing on the cake!

9/2/2015 22
Best Practices of Dashboard Designing

Resolution Scroll Bars Navigation

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Information Hierarchy

 Summary in top left corner

 Organize related information in groups
 Bottom right area is least highlighted

9/2/2015 24
Highlighting Important Information Effectively

When you look at information, your eyes should immediately be

drawn to the information that is most important

9/2/2015 25
Highlighting Important Information Effectively

When you look at information, your eyes should immediately be

drawn to the information that is most important

9/2/2015 26
Displaying Excessive Details Correctly

9/2/2015 27
Appropriate use of Visualization

Use right representation for information

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Appropriate use of Visualization

Ranking Part to whole Time Series

Correlation Distribution

9/2/2015 29
Oversizing of Visualization

Before

After

9/2/2015 30
Usage of colors

 Use same color, except when associated with differences in meaning

 Use different colors only when they correspond to different meaning in

the data

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Usage of colors

 To guarantee that most people who are color blind can distinguish groups
of data that are color coded, avoid using a combination of red & green in
the same display.

9/2/2015 32
 Less
Is More
Attractive

9/2/2015 33
Tableau Server Best Practices

1 . Optimize your workbook before uploading to server

• Performance or scale complaints arise because the workbooks being used
are not authored with best practices in mind. you should optimize the
workbook before you publish on Tableau server.

2 . Use Tableau data extracts

• If your database queries are slow, consider using extracts to increase
query performance as Tableau data extract resides in-memory.

3 . Schedule updates during off-peak times

• Scheduling extracts for off-peak hours can reduce peak-time load on both
the database and Tableau Server.

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Tableau Server Best Practices

4 . Use Single Sign On

• Tableau Server supports several types of single sign-on (SSO).
• With SSO, users don't have to explicitly sign in to Tableau Server.
• Instead, the credentials they've used to authenticate already (for
example, by signing in to your corporate network) are used to
authenticate them to Tableau Server.

5. Avoid ‘expensive’ operations during peak times

• Publishing, especially large files, is a very resource-consuming task.
• Ask users to publish during off-peak hours, avoiding busy times like
Monday mornings.
• To learn when your servers are being used the most, visit the
Administrator views, then create policy based on actual usage.

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Tableau Server Best Practices

6 . Control VizQL process execution

• With Tableau Server 9.0, you get better scale by actually reducing the
number of VizQL processes to less than four.

7. Factors that can impact performance and scalability

• Workbook design
• Server configuration
• Infrastructure tuning
• Networking

9/2/2015 36
Tableau Server Admin Best Practices

1. Don’t treat Tableau Server as a black box

• Scaling Tableau Server depends on many aspects of workload,
configuration, system environment, and your overall system under test
load.

2 . Cache views
• The response time will initially increase due to contention for shared
resources. With caching turned on, views from each request will be
cached and then rendered more quickly for the next viewer of the same
dashboard.

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Tableau Server Admin Best Practices

3 . Site Roles
• When a user is defined in Tableau Server, the user is assigned a role like
Server Administrator, Site Administrator, Publisher, Interactor, or Viewer.
• The site role provides an initial authorization that indicates what the user
is allowed to do.

4 . Users and Groups

• Users can be organized into groups, which is useful for authorization.
• You can configure authorization for groups instead of for individual users.
This is more convenient to handle user access & roles.

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Tableau Server Admin Best Practices

5 . Permissions
• Individual resources on the server have permissions that determine who is
allowed to see and interact with the dashboards.
• Permissions are resource-based: they are attached to projects, workbooks,
views, and data sources. The permissions specify which users or groups
can work with the resource.
• You can Allow & Deny Permissions to individual users or groups
specifically.

6 . Site Roles and Permissions (Resulting Permissions)

• Site roles determine the maximum permissions that a user is allowed.

9/2/2015 39
Tableau Server Admin Best Practices

7 . Data Security
• You can control which users can see which data
• For data sources that connect to live databases, you can also control
whether users are prompted to provide database credentials when they
click a published view.

8 . User filters
• You can set filters in a workbook or data source that control which data a
person sees in a published view, based on their Tableau Server login
account.

9/2/2015 40
Tableau Server Admin Best Practices

9 . Create a Performance Recording

• Use performance workbooks to analyze and troubleshoot performance
issues pertaining to different events that are known to affect performance,
including:
l Query execution
l Geocoding
l Connections to data sources
l Layout computations
l Extract generation
l Blending data
l Server blending (Tableau Server only)

9/2/2015 41