Getting Started with Tableau Public

Tableau is a set of software applications for analyzing data and producing interactive visualizations, primarily for analyzing business information. Check out this for a selection of Tableau visualizations.

Tableau provides their most popular product, Tableau Desktop, to FRC teams free of charge. That’s a good thing because it normally costs $75 per month. Should you decide to get serious about using Tableau, talk to your mentor about getting an activation key.

For learning Tableau, it’s easier to start with their free product, Tableau Public. It has almost all of the same features as Tableau Desktop, except that it does not allow users to save their visualizations and data to their local machine. Analysis must be saved to the cloud and made public. Since we’re just learning Tableau and we won’t be working with sensitive data, saving our work to the cloud is just fine.

Installing Tableau Public

1. Go to the Tableau Public website and sign up for a free account.
2. You will receive an email at the address you provided while signing up. Click the link in the email to activate your account.
3. Clicking the link will take you to the Tableau public sign-in page. Sign in to Tableau Public using the login information you provided in step 1. Tableau will ask for a bit more information and require you to accept their terms of service.
   
4. There are two ways to make a visualization in Tableau Public. They can be created within your web browser, or you can use Tableau’s desktop application. Let’s install the desktop application.
   1. Click on the Create dropdown near the upper-left corner of the page.
   2. Select Download Tableau Desktop Public Edition.
   3. Click the Download Tableau Public button.
   4. Provide your name, email address, country, and state.
   5. Click download again!
   6. Double click the downloaded file and and accept all default installation settings.

Tableau Desktop Public will open when the installation finishes.

Getting Some Data

Before we can analyze data, we need to tell Tableau where it is. The blue pane on the left lists several file formats that Tableau can connect to. For our first dataset, we’ll connect to the playlist_2010to222.csv file, which is available in the Tableau-Training topic in the Ryver Analytics forum.

CSV Files

Feel free to skip this section if you are already familiar with CSV files.

CSV stands for comma separated value. CSV files are plain text files that can be opened in any text editor (like Notepad on Windows). If you were to open playlist_2010to222.csv in a text editor, you would see something like this:

year,track_name,track_popularity,album,artist_name,artist_popularity,danceability
2000,Yellow,91,Parachutes,Coldplay,86,0.429
2000,All The Small Things,84,Enema Of The State,blink-182,75,0.434
2000,Try Again,70,Aaliyah,Aaliyah,65,0.794

CSV files contain tabular data, with each row of the file corresponding to a row of a data table. The table columns are separated by commas in the CSV file. The first row of a CSV file usually contains the column names. The example shown above has been truncated for clarity. The full CSV file contains 2,300 rows and 23 columns.

Microsoft Excel will open CSV files, or you can import them into a Google Sheet. Both programs will align the CSV file rows and columns with worksheet rows and columns, which makes the data easier to read.

Connecting to a CSV file with Tableau

When you first open Tableau, you’ll see something like this:

Tableau Data Pane

To connect to playlist_2010to222.csv:

1. Click on Text File.

2. Navigate to where you saved the playlist_2010to222.csv file and open it. Tableau will display an overview of the dataset.

   

   Playlist Dataset Overview

   Tableau displays the column names (in the Fields table) and the first 100 rows of the CSV file, which helps us get familiar with the data. Play with the Tableau features in the dataset overview. What information does Tableau provide about each column? Can you figure out how to sort the sample columns?