Tuesdays with Tableau: Why Tableau Is a Powerful Visualization Tool

By Gail Kluepfel

Like most data enthusiasts, I spent years mastering the advanced features of Excel and Power Pivot. I was skeptical of Tableau at first: why invest in yet another business intelligence tool? But my current mentor and manager, Paul Ausserer, is such a persuasive evangelist that I eventually gave Tableau a try. As soon as I did, I instantly converted.

To prevent myself from becoming the guest at a party who at first seems interesting but then goes on and on about her favorite pet, in this post I’m going to limit myself to one thing I love about Tableau and think potential users should know. But bookmark this blog, because each week I’ll be featuring a new reason to love Tableau in our new Tuesdays with Tableau series. Today, it’s all about visualization.

Put a Spotlight on Data that Matters with Color, Shape, and Size

A great visualization tool makes it easy to spot or highlight important data points so you can be super-efficient in gaining insight and avoid staring at a wall of numbers in tables. Tableau outshines the competition by allowing you to use color, size, and shape in an innovative way.

With minimal clicks, you can use color, shape, and size to see multiple data points in a single view and put a spotlight on what matters, to quickly see what’s going well and what’s not.

Tableau lets you use more than one data series to spotlight high and low performers in a single view. The bar chart below shows Sales by Customers, sorted in order of highest sales. I dropped the Profit data onto the Color mark, and, voila! I see not just customers who have the most sales, but also those with highest profits – just by looking at the gradation of colors from red to green. Suddenly it’s easy to see that some of the customers with lower sales are more profitable than customers with higher sales.

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The ability to “color” the data series generating the chart (Sales) with another data series (Profit) clearly differentiates Tableau from other tools, like Excel.

In the scatter plot below, I combined color with size and shape to visually identify high and low performers. This shows profit versus sales by region and product category, with the size for each determined by the number of items that customers have ordered. I immediately see which of our top sellers have higher profits versus sales, and in which regions. If I hover on a data point, the tool tip tells me that one of our lower volume technology items performed poorly in the south.

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Tableau lets me add as much information as I want to the tool tip, such as customer and product names. If I want more information on any point, I am only a click away from getting the full details from the underlying data. Here it shows the customer got enough of a discount (8%) to cut into profits on a low margin item.

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From this view, I can take action and talk to the regional manager in the south to understand discounting policy for this customer. All of this information is visualized and available in one view, with just a few clicks. It’s efficient to create and easy to see what’s important.

Tableau Has Easy-to-Use Parameters!

I was going to end this post here, but I had to mention one other outstanding Tableau feature: the power to create any kind of parameter to add greater user interactivity and control over the visualization. In this case, I created a parameter for a Profit Margin Threshold, and set it up so that any sale resulting in profit margins lower than the threshold will be colored red, and higher than threshold will turn green. I can quickly change the threshold value to see changes in the visualization.

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There are many other ways to use parameters, along with calculated fields, to enable dynamic and user-defined ways for working with data. You can expect to hear more each week at Tuesdays with Tableau, as we share the myriad ways Tableau accelerates your ability to see and understand data.

NEXT WEEK: Managing Data and Access to Tableau Workbooks with Tableau Server