10 Features of Tableau to Smoothen your Data Visualization Tasks
- 3. FEATURES OF TABLEAU Tableau is considered as one of the best Business Intelligence and data visualization tools and has managed to top the charts quite a few times since its launch. The most important quality of this tool is that it makes organizing, managing, visualizing and understanding data extremely easy for its users. One interesting aspect of Tableau that has been a key player in making it everyone’s favorite BI tool, is its easy drag-and-drop functionality. You do not need to come from a technical background or know a lot of coding to be able to work on Tableau. You can easily master this tool by understanding and learning its UI-based features and functionalities to create dashboards and analyze reports.
- 4. TABLEAU DASHBOARD Tableau Dashboards provide a wholesome view of your data by the means of visualizations, visual objects, text, etc. Dashboards are very informative as they can present data in the form of stories, enable the addition of multiple views and objects, provide a variety of layouts and formats, enable the users to deploy suitable filters. You even have the option to copy a dashboard or its specific elements from one workbook to another easily. COLLABORATION AND SHARING Tableau provides convenient options to collaborate with other users and instantly share data in the form of visualizations, sheets, dashboards, etc. in real-time. It allows you to securely share data from various data sources such as on-premise, on-cloud, hybrid, etc. Instant and easy collaboration and data sharing help in getting quick reviews or feedback on the data leading to a better overall analysis of it.
- 5. LIVE AND IN-MEMORY DATA Tableau ensures connectivity to both live data sources or data extraction from external data sources as in-memory data. This gives the user the flexibility to use data from more than one type of data source without any restrictions. You can use data directly from the data source by establishing live data connections or keep that data in-memory by extracting data from a data source as per their requirement. DATA SOURCES IN TABLEAU Tableau offers a myriad of data source options you can connect to and fetch data from. Data sources ranging from on-premise files, spreadsheets, relational databases, non- relational databases, data warehouses, big data, to on-cloud data are all available on Tableau. One can easily establish a secure connection to any of the data sources from Tableau and use that data along with data from other sources to create a combinatorial view of data in the form of visualizations.
- 6. ADVANCED VISUALIZATIONS (CHART TYPES) One of the key features of Tableau and the one that got its popularity is its wide range of visualizations. In Tableau, you can make visualizations as basic as a: • Bar chart • Pie chart and as advanced as a: • Histogram • Gantt chart • Bullet chart • Motion chart • Treemap • Boxplot and many more. You can select and create any kind of visualization easily by selecting the visualization type from the Show Me tab.
- 7. MAPS Yet another important feature of Tableau is the map. Tableau has a lot of pre-installed information on maps such as cities, postal codes, administrative boundaries, etc. This makes the maps created on Tableau very detailed and informative. You can add different layers of geology on the map as per your requirements and create informative maps in Tableau with your data. ROBUST SECURITY Tableau takes special care of data and user security. It has a fool-proof security system based on authentication and permission systems for data connections and user access. Tableau also gives you the freedom to integrate with other security protocols such as Active Directory, Kerberos, etc. An important point to note here is that Tableau practices row-level filtering which helps in keeping the data secure.
- 8. ASK DATA Tableau acknowledges the importance of mobile phones in today’s world and provides a mobile version of the Tableau app. One can create their dashboards and reports in such a manner that it is also compatible with mobile. Tableau has the option of creating customized mobile layouts for your dashboard specific to your mobile device. MOBILE VIEW The Ask data feature of Tableau makes it even more favored by the users globally. This feature makes playing with data just a matter of simple searches as we do on Google. You just need to type a query about your data in natural language and Tableau will present you with the most relevant answers. The answers are not only in the form of text but also as visuals.
- 9. TREND LINES AND PREDICTIVE ANALYSIS Another extremely useful feature of Tableau is the use of time series and forecasting. Easy creation of trend lines and forecasting is possible due to Tableau’s powerful backend and dynamic front end. You can easily get data predictions such as a forecast or a trend line by simply selecting some options and drag-and-drop operations using your concerned fields.
- 10. MISCELLANEOUS FEATURES OF TABLEAU Along with the list of key features that we just covered, Tableau is loaded with a lot of other important as well as useful features listed below: • Cross database join • Nested sorting • Drag-and-drop integration • Data connectors • Prep conductor • Text editor • Revision history • Licensing views • ETL refresh • Web Data connector • External service integration • Split function
- 11. SUMMARY In this way, we complete our discussion on the features of Tableau. We hope you got enough information on Tableau and its wide range of features. Tableau is a very useful tool loaded with user-friendly features and functionalities which helps us extract valuable information from raw data and analyze it using visualizations.