Getting Started:

Welcome to Tableau Desktop. Learn more about the product and what it can do. Then explore the Tableau work-space to get familiar with the environment. Finally, follow a step-by-step tutorial that guides you through connecting to data and building your first view.

      • What is Tableau Desktop? 

      • The Tableau Environment

      • Learning to Use Tableau

What is Tableau Desktop?

Tableau Software provides software applications for fast analytical and rapid fire business intelligence.

Tableau Desktop is a data visualization application that lets you analyze virtually any type of structured data and produce highly interactive, beautiful graphs, dashboards, and reports in just minutes. After a quick installation, you can connect to virtually any data source from spreadsheets to data warehouses and display information in multiple graphic perspectives. Designed to be easy to use, you’ll be working faster than ever before.

Tableau Server is a business intelligence solution that provides browser-based visual analytics anyone can use at just a fraction of the cost of typical BI software. With just a few clicks, you can publish or embed live, interactive graphs, dashboards and reports with current data automatically customized to the needs of everyone across your organization. It deploys in minutes and users can produce thousands of reports without the need of IT services — all within your IT infrastructure.

Tableau Reader is a free viewing application that lets anyone read and interact with packaged workbooks created by Tableau Desktop.

The company is one of the 50 fastest growing software companies in the U.S. Our applications are being used by over 30,000 people worldwide. Customers include companies as diverse as Google, Cleveland Clinic, GM, Microsoft, Wells Fargo, the District of Columbia, Allstate, Cornell and Harvard.

        • What can I do with Tableau Desktop? 

        • What data can I analyze with Tableau? 

        • How Does Tableau Work?

What can I do with Tableau Desktop?

Imagine being able to answer virtually any business question by dragging-and-dropping your data into a free-form visual canvas. You create beautiful graphs, reports and dashboards. You then share those results in just a few clicks. Using Tableau Desktop, you can build and interact with views of data. These views allow you to query, display, analyze, filter, sort, group, drill down, drill up, calculate, organize, summarize, and present data faster and more efficiently than ever before. With Tableau Sever and Tableau Public you can share and embed your live, interactive views, reports, and dashboards so that colleagues can interact, customize or monitor them.

The various ways that Tableau can help you get more from your data are discussed in more detail below.

         • Visually Analyze Data Rapidly 

         • Build Interactive Dashboards

         • Share and Interact

Visually Analyze Data Rapidly

See and Understand

People need effective views of data to understand results, discover relationships, find patterns, locate outlives, uncover structure, and summarize findings. how well can you see what is going on in your business?

Tableau lets you ask rapid questions of your data by letting you iteratively create and modify live, interactive charts, reports and dashboards in minutes. These views are fundamentally more useful for analysis than those provided by pre-canned reports and traditional dashboards. Tableau gives you interactive visual tables, picture-perfect data displays, side-by-side comparisons, and graphic encodings using color, size and shape. Without any programming or training, users can see and understand data like they’ve never been able to before.

Browse and Explore

Tableau is the world’s leading exploratory browser for databases. A key step in the analysis process is the ability to start with “big picture” summaries of data and then quickly focus on detailed areas of interest.

To conduct effective analysis, it is crucial for people to quickly change what data they are viewing and how it is being viewed. Tableau’s flexible interface enables this free form exploration. Exploratory analysis is further supported with unlimited undo and redo, allowing people to surf their databases much like they surf the web.

Build Interactive Dashboards

Build Dashboards People Can Understand 

Use Tableau to build dashboards that communicate clearly and directly. Each element of a dashboard presents information in the most effective way possible, based on the latest research in human perception. Tableau provides the display type that best expresses the data—bar and line charts, maps, tables, scatter plots, and more. Tableau helps you build dashboards that inform and impress.

Monitor and Measure

Use Tableau to build analytical dashboards that compare information and track performance against goals. These dashboards can be based on multiple data sources. They are fully interactive, allowing you to drill into and explore information directly from the dashboard. You can also apply common filters to all the worksheets, allowing you to change the filter and watch an array of visual displays update simultaneously

Interact and Drill-down 

Sometimes you need to answer additional questions within a dashboard. With Tableau, viewers can dynamically filter, highlight, drill-down and link across multiple views in one dashboard. This essentially creates an interactive visual analysis application on the fly.

Share and Interact

Present 

Imagine pasting Tableau’s vivid multi-dimensional results into Microsoft Office applications and sharing them with others. our users have a reputation for producing high-impact presentations that are easy to understand.

Publish and Embed

Share your graphs, reports, and dashboards by publishing them with Tableau Server. Anyone with proper data credentials can view and interact with those visualizations using just a browser. They can even save custom views, make comments, or even tag favorites. Don’t want people to visit a specific URL destination for their views? No problem—embed them in virtually any web application with just a few lines of code.

What data can I analyze with Tableau?

Your data needs to be in a database, spreadsheet or structured text format before you can analyze it with Tableau. Databases include relational databases and multidimensional OLAP databases. The specific databases your copy of Tableau can connect to depends on your purchase options. Refer to the Technical Specifications on our website for a complete list of supported data sources.

To see which data sources your copy of Tableau can connect to, select Data > Connect to Data. Any data source that is not supported by your version of Tableau is greyed out. Contact Tableau to upgrade your database accessibility options.

How Does Tableau Work?

While Tableau lets you analyze databases and spreadsheets like never before, you don’t need to know anything about databases to use Tableau. In fact, Tableau is designed to allow business people with no technical training to analyze their data efficiently.

Tableau is based on three simple concepts:

1. Connect - Connect Tableau to any database that you want to analyze. Note that Tableau does not import the data. Instead it queries to the database directly.

2. Analyze - Analyzing data means viewing it, filtering it, sorting it, performing calculations on it, reorganizing it, summarizing it, and so on.

       Using Tableau you can do all of these things by simply arranging fields of your data source on a Tableau worksheet. When you drop a field on a worksheet, Tableau queries the data using standard drivers and query languages (like SQL and MDX) and presents a visual analysis of the data.

3. Share - You can share results with others either by sharing workbooks with other Tableau users, by pasting results into applications such as Microsoft Office, printing to PDF or by using Tableau Server to publish or embed your views across your organization.