Today I want to tell you about a useful tool for creating various interactive graphs, maps and charts, as well as their publication on the Internet. And yes, some of you have guessed right, it’s Tableau Public.
In general, if you mix Excel in terms of charting, its wonderful omnivorousness in terms of data sources, as well as the ability to publish charts and Dashboard on the Internet through its own platform, we will get a product called Tableau. There are several of them, and they all differ from each other in functionality and ability to solve problems. You can find the entire list of solutions here -> Tableau.
Tableu Public (all free, by the way) has one major difference from all his fellow-programs, even from another free version — Tableau Free. Tableau Public does not save work-in-process projects on the user’s local drives, only online, on a dedicated Tableau Public’s server.
In other words, this solution has been created by the developers primarily for bloggers or social network users, who usually create their projects for sharing and publishing on the Internet only (or for personal projects, with no need to hide it from someone who hypothetically can see the results of your work online) . Also, the platform is used by various online publications, public organizations, scientists and students worldwide.
This is an example of how the Dashboard will look like after publishing on the web with multiple interactive schedules.
To get an idea of how Tableau Public works, can be obtained from this video:
Let’s look at a few of them here:
Amazing «omnivorousness» in matters of data sources
Tableau supports import from MS Excel, MS Access, and impressive number of text formats, and server databases.
Ease of Use
Tableau products are designed to maximize usability for its user to work with data. Different types of pre-sorting, changing chart types just with a few mouse clicks — all this makes the work with Tableau Public very useful, friendly and intuitive. Even if you’re new to visualization, Tableau Public on the basis of automatic analysis of your data will recommend you a practical way to visualize. This function is called «Show Me» and a video should be shown about this feature:
Result and its interactivity
Charts created using Tableau Public differ from Excel documents. They are interactive. By clicking the mouse on the graph or chart, an additional information appears. It makes the «picture» informative, which makes the process of learning particular information more interesting and more convenient. At the same time, you do not need to learn programming languages, Flash or something like that, to create a nice-looking interactive visualization.
Sociality
Once you have published data and charts on the Internet, users can share your visualization with each other in social networks and even download the analytical charts already created by you. In addition to that, users can download raw data to construct their own visualizations. Also, users can embed your visualization for themselves, and it will always be up to date if you’re changing something in it. And it’s worth noting that you save full control over created graphs, even after their publication.
Кстати, очень обрадовала автоматическая привязка данных к карте мира, как по ZIP-кодам в США, так, и по широте-долготе. Выглядеть это будет примерно так:
By the way, I was very pleased to see an automatic data binding to the world map, both on ZIP-codes in the United States, and latitude-longitude. It will look like this:
When started to use Tableau Public, I realized how much I needed this tool during my college years. With this program, data analysis has become much more comfortable and back then, I probably would not have to produce a bunch of documents and spend whole evening on trying to make my charts look more or less visually attractive.
Download and try latest version (and highly recommended) from Tableau’s website: http://www.tableausoftware.com/products/public
Also, on that website you can find quite interesting gallery of works created in Tableau Public. Works from such giants as Wall Street Journal, New Scientist and Wired can be seen there. Look at it, it’s really interesting.
Perhaps it can take place in the list of tools used by you — if is not necessary to protect your data visualization with confidentiality. Well, if otherwise — than you should go directly to the sales department of Tableau. Let us know, we can give an advice.
