Welcome to tableau
BACKGROUND
What is Tableau? Founded in 2003 by Stanford academics (Chris, Christian and Pat) who wanted a tool that would allow users to understand data visually.
TYPICAL WORKFLOW
Let's say I run a chain of stores that promotes squirrel feed and other fripperies. Data from the sales of nuts are stored in a spreadsheet or some web-first application like the cloud. At the end of each quarter, I want to review sales. To accomplish this, I retrieve data for the entire period and ensure it is accurate before exploring it for insights. Insights might be derived from exploratory data analysis or pre-existing questions, for example, did actual sales meet forecasted sales each month? Once these questions have been answered, I want to share these insights with similarly enthusiastic colleagues.
Decision-makers will then reflect on how the business has performed and set new targets. This process is essentially the same whether you are a three-person hedge-fund, with a dog as chief economist, or a multinational corporation.
PRODUCTS
Tableau has six products that aim to solve some of the challenges presented by each stage of the typical data workflow.
At the time of writing, Tableau does not offer a stand-alone product for data collection and storage. The next stage is analysis. Actually, there is an intermediate step known as extract, transform, load (ETL). This is required when, for example, the timestamp on transactional data is captured in a time zone different from the time zone used to report financials. To handle this, you'll need to adjust for the difference manually or in bulk. For this, Tableau has a reasonably new product called Tableau Prep Builder. It allows you to shape, clean and transform your data in an easy to understand interface.
We are now ready to connect to the data and mine it for insight. Enter Tableau Desktop. Tableau Desktop can connect to virtually any format from Excel to Web APIs. Tableau Desktop also empowers users to explore data and build reports—at speed. Time to insight can be a competitive advantage in a world with ballooning volumes of data. Tableau Public is a free version that achieves much the same without the ability to limit access to the data. And so is a great use case for charities, non-profits, journalists, or local authorities who are open to sharing data with a broader audience.
Great organisations are built on collaboration, and so it is with Tableau Server and Tableau Online where the magic of sharing happens. The former gives you complete control of your database systems either on-premise or online, whereas the latter is managed by Tableau on your behalf. Both can scale to hundreds of users probing data at the same time.
Lastly, Tableau Reader is used for sharing interactive visualisations with folks who don’t have paid up access to Tableau Server. The use case is thus limited to the consumption of authored views or visualisations created by others.