What is Tableau ?

In this digital era, analytics is a major enabler that assists business leaders and stakeholders in deriving valuable data crucial for the organization’s growth. When interacting with digital devices, people generate as high as 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. Without proper analysis, such raw data may become meaningless without deep insights. Moreover, these large datasets require fast compilation and in-depth research with greater accuracy. Thus, it becomes imperative for businesses to use advanced data visualization tools and go through the data quickly. 

Business Intelligence and data visualization tools can help businesses collect, change, and present data and allow them to make efficient decisions. Using such tools, companies can bring together all the data in one place, even if it has multiple channels. They include forecast engines that can automate data predictions and issue alerts in case of any anomalies. These visualization tools come with handy drag and drop features, real-time KPI dashboards to generate detailed reports. One of the best business intelligence and analytics tools available in the market is Tableau.      

This article gives you a complete overview of Tableau and why you should rely on Tableau eLearning to become well-versed in using it.

An Introduction to Tableau

Popularly known as a visual analytics platform, Tableau is transforming the way companies use data to solve business problems. The platform was designed with an aim to put the power of data into the hands of people, allowing a wide range of business users to engage with their data, ask questions, find solutions and create more value. Tableau is a powerful, flexible, and secure end-to-end analytics platform that disrupts business intelligence with intuitive, visual analytics for everyone.

Founded in 2003, Tableau has come a long way and continuously invested in research and development at a commendable pace to help people build attractive visualizations. Because of its growing popularity, Salesforce (world’s number 1 Customer Relationship Management – CRM software) acquired Tableau in 2019, and companies across the world are embracing Tableau. The tool also supports a community where there are over one million active members who inspire and support one another.

Tableau Products

The Tableau Product suite involves the following: 

• Tableau Prep
• Tableau Desktop
• Tableau Server and Tableau Online 
• Tableau Mobile

Tableau Prep

Tableau Prep transforms the way data preparation was performed in an organization traditionally. It facilitates a visual and direct way to combine, shape, and clean data; thus allowing business users and analysts to begin their analysis faster. You can also automate the data prep process so that there is always fresh data that is prepped and ready for analysis.  There are two products included in Tableau Prep:

Tableau Prep Builder – used to build data flows.

Tableau Prep Conductor – schedule, monitor, and manage flows across the company. 

Tableau Desktop

Tableau Desktop, known as the gold standard in visual analytics, provides unlimited data exploration through an intuitive interface and encourages curiosity, creativity, and data-driven decision making. You can build visualizations with drag and drop, ask questions using natural language, and employ AI-driven statistical modeling with a click. Interactive dashboards will help you identify hidden correlations on the fly. It allows you to connect to data, whether it is on-premises or in the cloud, whether it’s an SQL database, spreadsheet, or cloud apps like Salesforce and Google Analytics. 

Tableau Online and Tableau Server

With Tableau Server, you can extend the value of your data across the entire organization. (on-premises or in a public cloud). It allows you to centrally manage all of your metadata and security rules. Tableau Online facilitates hosted self-service analytics in the cloud, removing your need to manage servers. Using it, you can invite customers to explore hidden trends with interactive visualizations and accurate data. Organizations love this true enterprise-scale analytics platform for its ease of deployment, simplicity of scalability, excellent reliability, and robust integration.

Tableau Mobile 

There is a Tableau Mobile app for both Android and iOS users which you can download to access and monitor the most important KPIs and dashboards on the go. You can create a metric from nearly any Tableau dashboard with a single click and watch metrics across various dashboards directly on the mobile app. Whether or not you are connected to your network, your data is always at your fingertips through interactive previews. 

Should You Learn Tableau?

With so many advanced features, it makes sense to know more about the tool. Tableau is an in-demand skill if your job role involves visualizing data of any kind such as data analysts, data scientists, machine learning engineers, data architects, and so on. A lot of companies are using Tableau these days, and knowing it can put you ahead of your peers while applying for jobs. Honeywell, Lufthansa, Verizon, hello Fresh, Red Hat, and Nissan are some of the popular clients of Tableau. 

E-learning platforms can be your best choice to gain expertise in Tableau. All you need is to enroll in an online training course and start exploring the tool. Through integrated labs, online training programs offer you trial access to the tool without purchasing any license. By learning from industry experts, you would know which features are used the most in enterprises.