Tableau is a visualised platform used in business intelligence and analytics to assist individuals witness, understand, observe, and make decisions with various data. It's commonly used within Business Intelligence (BI) processes.
What is Tableau?
It is crafted in such a way that different kinds of graphs, plots, and charts can be situated simultaneously for visualisation. When it comes to data type and structure and their access in tableau, it can operate on any data, whether unstructured and structured data files, with access to just about any programming language such as SAS, R, Python, etc. It is also capable of running on both virtual and physical machines. It is a system with multiple users, processes, and threads.
Also Read: Tableau best practices
Moreover, one great thing about it is that it does not require any specific kind of expertise in technical knowledge or programming or scripting, so anyone-even without a technical background-can figure it out and work with it.
Tableau's operation is explained in detail
Tableau connects and extracts data from various sources. It can retrieve information from any system thinkable. It can retrieve information from a simple database like PDF or Excel to extremely complicated databases, like a database in the cloud like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud SQL, and various other data sources.
When you initiate Tableau, fully prepared data connectors are readily accessible, users can connect to just about any database. The amounts of data connectors backed by it differ based on the software version you have.
The extracted data can be linked live or exported to Tableau Desktop, its data engine. It's where the data scientist and data engineer work with the retrieved data to create visualisations. The dashboards that are created are distributed to users as static files. The file is viewed by the users who get the dashboards using Tableau Reader.
Other than that, the data from Tableau Desktop can further be published to Tableau’s server. It is a platform that facilitates collaboration, allocation, supervision, security models, and automation. The end users have a better experience with the Tableau Server. This is because they can access files from any location, whether from a mobile device, a desktop or email.
Major Characteristics
Although as convenient as Tableau is to use, creating a dashboard is more feasible and flexible due to its superior features. Some of the platform’s characteristics are listed below.
Its usability includes the following features:
- Quick access from multiple sources.
- No need for technological or programming expertise.
- Fast response time when creating a dashboard.
- The file format can also be downloaded locally. This can be done on a desktop/mobile for many purposes including easy analysing and visualising, and multilingual data representation. Additionally, real-time exploration of any dataset, and so on.
- It has several advanced built-in features. These are collaboration and distribution, highly secure connections to multiple data sources. Moreoer, an easy way of importing and exporting massive amounts of data.
