Learn how effective data visualization in Tableau goes beyond statistics to include storytelling and graphic design. Understand how to align your visuals with data insights while navigating Tableau's various tools and platforms for different professional needs.
Key Insights
- Creating impactful visualizations in Tableau requires not only statistical knowledge but also strong storytelling and graphic design skills, including an understanding of color theory and how the brain processes visual information.
- The trifecta principle—understanding the question being asked, interpreting what the data objectively says, and ensuring the visual aligns with that data—is critical to producing clear and honest visualizations.
- Noble Desktop highlights the differences among Tableau tools: Tableau Public is free but shares data online; Tableau Reader requires a paid license; Tableau Prep is used for data cleanup; and Tableau Server or Cloud options offer greater data privacy for organizations handling sensitive information.
This lesson is a preview from our Tableau Course Online (includes software). Enroll in this course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
Foundations for building your data visualizations. To create a good data visualization in Tableau you need statistical skills. Some of you have taken SQL classes, Excel classes, and Python classes, and now this is another piece of your puzzle to becoming a data analyst or a data scientist.
So understanding the data that you're working with is important. This is something I think people already know. I don't need to tell you this.
Here's a couple of things that you may not take into consideration. Storytelling. How good of a storyteller are you? The ability to communicate insights about the data, and we'll take a look at that.
Graphic design. How are your graphic design skills? Do you know anything about color theory? Do you know how the brain processes information and how graphic design can have an impact on that? So if you're not aware of those things, then you may be like someone who's a brilliant actor who doesn't get any roles, and they feel sorry for you. You're so brilliant.
How come, you know, you're much better than the guy who's really famous? Well, it might be that they have better storytelling or graphic design skills. So there's also something called the trifecta principle. Ideally we want the results of our investigations to be one and the same when creating charts by asking the following three questions.
What is the question? What is the question the person asking you for the visualization asking? Did I really hear their question or did I make an interpretation about what they're asking? What does the data say? So objectively, what does the data say? Don't come into it with a bias, but just see what does the data say. Then does the visual line up with what the data says? If it doesn't, then you have conflict. And so you want to, you may get a result that you're not expecting.
What are you going to do then? So it's very important that you understand that the data and the visualizations may not say the same thing, and you may have to edit your visualization to show what's really happening. If you need to explain a good visualization, it's probably not a good one. So it should communicate instantly to the person looking at it what this visualization is trying to say.
You shouldn't have to do something like I'm doing right now with the PowerPoint presentation, do a lot of talking about explaining something using these visuals. Tableau version comparison. Yes, I'll briefly go over this.
If you have any questions, let me know. It's a necessary evil, but if you're going to use the application, there's a desktop paid version. There's the public free version that hopefully you're using today.
There's also Tableau Reader. A good analogy for Tableau Reader is like Adobe Acrobat Reader, except that analogy falls apart when you realize it's not free. You have to pay for it.
It requires a sign in. You mean I can't just look at it as a PDF or look at it in my browser? Well, you could go to public.tableau.com for people who are willing to share their information for free, but if you want to use Tableau Reader when you're on a flight and you don't have Wi-Fi and you just want to be able to read the information and you don't have internet, you're going to have to use Tableau Reader and you're going to have to pay for it and it's not free. Okay, what else is there? There are other programs that were created to serve certain needs.
If you work in Power BI, you don't have to pay for this application that Tableau offers. It's called Tableau Prep and that is for data cleanup. You may get information that needs to be cleaned up.
If you're working in Power BI, you have Power Query. It's built in. You don't have to pay an extra price for that, but in Tableau, if you want to clean up your data, you'll need to use Tableau Prep if the data is not already clean.
So Tableau can change the data before you connect to it in Tableau. It's usually considered a no-no that you are able to change data in Tableau because you're messing with the data integrity. You could make up stuff.
So Tableau is not about changing data, but if you need to clean up your data, you'll use Tableau Prep. And then there's Tableau Server, Online, and Cloud. So again, it depends on if you have a paid license or not.
The paid license will allow you to have your own private server. So that means that your information is secret and you don't have to share it online in a way that other people can discover it. So for people whose companies require greater security and not publishing to Tableau Public, which by its name describes what your information is, Public, you can also, in Tableau Public, choose not to share your visualizations.
But people who in organizations are not going to be happy that even though it's not being made public, because you can hide it, it's still available on Tableau servers. So anyone who works at Tableau can look at that data. So if you're working with proprietary information, perhaps having your own server is going to be where you're going to go.
Again, you'll have to pay for that.
