<aside> ❗ In case you get stuck with this tutorial, the Q&A: Making visualisations with the Grammar of Graphics live session on Wednesday 19 October (between 15h30 and 16h30) is a good occasion to pose your questions. But you can always add your questions directly as comments in this module.
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Tableau is one of the most popular visual data analytics software. It was created as a spinoff company of research done at Stanford University in 2003. In 2019 Tableau was acquired by cloud-based software company Salesforce for 15,7 billion dollars.
Tableau has its roots in the Grammar of Graphics. This is very clear in the way visualisations are created in Tableau: users literally map variables of their data to aesthetics of geometric objects by dragging and dropping them onto visual properties in the interface.
The main focus of Tableau is on building and sharing interactive dashboards. It is not designed to be a tool for making print ready graphics.
Tableau sells many versions of its software. In this module, you are going to use the free Tableau Public. The main limitation of this free version is that files cannot be saved locally on your own computer. Saving is only possible by uploading and publicly sharing files in the cloud.
<aside> ❗ If you can’t or don’t want to install new software on your computer, skip to the Using Tableau online section below
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Using Tableau Public requires you to download and install it. To do so, navigate to tableau.com/products/public/download and click the “Download Tableau Public” button.
Source: Maarten Lambrechts, CC BY SA 4.0
An overlay appears asking you to leave some of your details. You can put anything in these fields, you just have to make sure that the field for your email address contains a “@” character and a dot with some extension, like “.com”.
Source: Maarten Lambrechts, CC BY SA 4.0
Clicking the “Download the app” button will start your download. If this does not start automatically, you will be presented with some links to start the download manually.
Source: Maarten Lambrechts, CC BY SA 4.0
An alternative to downloading and installing Tableau Public is to use Tableau online. To do so, navigate to public.tableau.com/app/discover?authMode=signUp and create a Tableau Public account. After you have created an account and have signed in, click your profile icon in the top right and go to My Profile.
Source: Maarten Lambrechts, CC BY SA 4.0
On your profile page, click the Create a Viz button to launch the online Tableau interface.