Tableau Set Up

Tableau Set Up

Tableau is a data visualization and analytics tool. One great thing about Tableau is that they provide a free product called Tableau Public, which is perfect for learning and exploring BI and visualizations. We will use this to look at and explore "The Company" data but also show you how to use the tool itself as BI tools are very useful in People Analytics.

Tableau Public is very similar to their commercial versions of Tableau. Two of the big downsides are that you can only connect to a limited number of data sources and you always save your workbooks publicly. While this is obviously not ideal for People Analytics work in the real world, this is not an issue for our needs on this blog. The paid versions, Tableau Server and Tableau Online, can solve your data needs when working with data you need to keep secure.

I will walk you through how to download and setup Tableau Public on your computer and go over some things to get you started.

Setting Up Tableau Public:

• Download Tableau Public Here
• Make sure you sign up for a Tableau Public account as this is how you will be able to save your workbooks!
• When you get Tableau Public downloaded this is what you will see 

1. This is where you can select the data you will be using in Tableau. 
2.  If you need some inspiration for visuals you can create. I highly recommend the "Viz of the day" link. You will find some really great visuals there.
3. The Resources section also has some trainings and sample data you can use. 

• Here is the data we will be checking. If you created your own data you might have gotten different results because of all the random formulas so if your visuals look different that could be the issue!
  
  When you have the data downloaded you can connect to it by clicking "Text File" because it is a CSV file.

• When the data is connected you should see this layout.

1. This is where you can check your data.
2. In this area you can join different data together.
3. Here you can see the data file you are using and make changes to which file you are using.

On the bottom left corner you will see this:

Clicking on Sheet 1 will bring you to your first are to create visuals in Tableau. If you click the tab to the right of Sheet 1 you will create a new sheet. The button to the right will allow you to create a Dashboard and finally the button to the right of that a Story.

Have fun exploring the data and if you have any questions there are many resources online like Tableaus community page to help you learn. I will write more about Tableau and how you can use it in future posts.