So, we’ve already connected our file to Tableau.
Now, in this lesson we will be creating our first sheet.
It’s really easy to do and resembles how we create a sheet in Excel or pretty much
every other spreadsheet software.
All I have to do is click here and a new sheet will be created.
Right.
This is what a Tableau sheet looks like.
We can have as many of them as we want.
I can simply click on this little icon at the bottom and a new worksheet is added.
The other two icons, which are next to it are for creating a new dashboard and a new
story.
We’ll deal with dashboards further in the course, so we won’t use these buttons for
now.
Ok.
Let’s give some structure to what you are seeing here.
If this software is new to you, things can be a bit confusing, so it will be best if
we spend a few minutes (the remained of this lesson) taking you through Tableau’s interface.
First off, we have ten different tabs on Tableau’s default Ribbon.
These are File, Data, Worksheet, Dashboard, Story, Analysis, Map, Format, Window, and
Help.
Let’s quickly go through each of them.
As with most programs, the File tab contains functionalities related to opening, closing,
and saving files.
If you would like to, you can also exit Tableau from here, but .. why would you want to do
that?
 Data, on the other hand, is where you will
find functionalities related to the data source you are using.
Here you can add a new data connection, replace an existing one, or simply edit the data source
of the worksheet you are working with.
Next, we have the worksheet tab.
It can be helpful when we want to create a new worksheet, hide or show a chart’s title,
caption, summary, and so on ... I am sure you noticed that we already created a new
sheet with the little icon we have at the bottom left corner of the sheet.
And we can do the same thing from the worksheet tab as well.
Such repetition is common for most programs.
Functionalities available in the ribbon can be accessed in other ways too.
In fact, I rarely use the ribbon functionalities, but it is good to have an overview and be
aware that they are there.
Ok, next, we have the dashboard and story tabs.
As I said, we’ll learn more about dashboards and stories later on in the course.
The Analysis tab is where you can tweak your visualization in terms of labels, show figures
as a percentage of the total, add trend lines, legends, filters and more.
We’ll explore many of these options later in the course.
For now, you can remember that here we have some interesting functionalities related to
the way we perform our analysis and some of the tools we’ll incorporate in it.
‘Map’ is a tab that is helpful when we use Tableau’s geographic visualization capabilities.
Pretty soon you will see that this is one of the most powerful and impressive Tableau
features.
Of course, Format can help us adjust the way our visualization appears.
From here we can modify its font, font size, axis, backgrounds, labels, size, and so much
more ... That’s another tab containing plenty of useful functionalities we’ll explore
later.
‘Windows’ and ‘Help’ are two of the standard tabs we find in most programs, so
I am not going to spend much time on them, also because we are not going to use them
throughout the course.
However, one thing we should mention is that Tableau Public has a nice and open community
of users who will be able to help you and whose work you can look at if needed.
All users of Tableau Public who save their work make it publicly available.
Therefore, this can be a useful place where you can search for a given issue you need
help with and see what comes up.
So, if I click on “Community” and search for “Geography”, I’ll be able to see
the work other users have saved previously.
Right.
This is Tableau’s ribbon.
Below the ribbon we have several buttons that can be quite helpful.
The “show start page” button takes us to the screen we saw previously when we connected
Tableau and our GDP Data Excel file.
To get back to the sheet that was created earlier, I’ll click here.
I’m sure you know how to work with Undo and Redo.
So, if I were to drag one of the fields here, I can go back and undo this action with undo,
of course.
See?
Undone.
Most of the typical Windows shortcuts can be used here as well.
As you probably know, the shortcut for undo is Ctrl Z.
On the right, we have other useful buttons such as save (allowing you to save the progress
of your work..).
Quite intuitively, “new data source” opens the “Connect” functionality we saw earlier.
The other buttons we have here are new worksheet, clear sheet, swap rows and columns, sort,
and so on..
We’ll explore many of these throughout the course.
For now, it would be best if you simply gain an idea how various objects are positioned
within Tableau’s interface.
Ok.
On the left side of Tableau’s screen, we have two panes – Data and Analytics.
The Data pane is quite important.
It shows us what data we’ve loaded, and then Tableau classifies the data into two
types – “dimensions” and “measures”.
To put it slightly differently, this is a distinction between categorical and numerical
data.
The data in the “dimensions field” cannot be aggregated, it is qualitative in nature.
Quite the opposite “measures” can be aggregated and are quantitative in nature.
In the next few lessons, we’ll learn how to work with these fields, but for now it
would be nice if I just show you that we can drag dimensions and measures into the work
area and use them to create our visualizations there.
The work area is where we’ll create our visualizations, dashboards, and stories, and
this is one way to create a chart.
I am sure you noticed that the ‘columns-and-rows’ part of the sheet started showing us the variables
we’ve added to the work space area.
We’ll explore this part of the interface in a separate video in a few lessons.
Ok.
Perfect.
What else do we have?
The “show me” button on the right, which allows us to adjust the type of visualization
we use.
It is a very cool feature because Tableau tells us what types of visualizations we can
choose from, as not all charts will be available depending on the data we have chosen to work
with.
Once we decide we would like to switch to a different chart, all we need to do is select
the respective type of chart and Tableau makes the adjustment for us.
Neat, right?
And finally, here in the middle we have three important sections – pages, filters, and
marks.
The Pages shelf lets you break a view into a series of pages so you can better analyze
how a specific field affects the rest of the data in a view.
We’ll use the “Filters” shelf when working with filters and filtering our data.
The “Marks” shelf, on the other hand, contains functionalities related to coloring,
size, labels, and so on..
This lesson was a quick overview of Tableau’s interface.
I am sure now you have a better idea of what you see in front of you when you open the
program.
In the lessons to come, we’ll continue to explore Tableau’s functionalities and you’ll
learn a ton about each of the buttons we mentioned here.
As of now – this will do.
Thanks for watching!