Building Tableau Reports: A Comprehensive Guide

Organizations can use Tableau to build Tableau Reports that helps them analyze their customer requirements seamlessly. Users can create and access reports within Tableau Online or Tableau report builder, leveraging features similar to those found in Tableau Desktop. Tableau Reports are an in-built feature of Tableau.

It helps different users visualize data from multiple sources onto reports to better understand how far they have reached their milestones, better understand their customer needs and also predict future plans. This article will discuss how you can build Tableau Reports and perform various business transformations to analyze data. It will also provide a brief overview of Tableau reporting tool and its features. Read along to LEARN more details on how you can build Tableau Reports.

Introduction to Tableau

Tableau is a widely used Business Intelligence tool in the current market. Its popularity is due to its capability of handling Big Data and is relatively simple to deploy, learn and use. Tableau generates insights from the raw data and creates a visual masterpiece for businesses’ step-by-step color data-driven decisions.

The effectiveness of a business analyst lies in his ability to portray the data used for decision-making in the most intuitive way. Tableau’s biggest strength is its ability to generate valuable insights from multiple sources of data and visualizing them by using features such as Tableau Reports.

The products that Tableau offers are shown below.

Key Features of Tableau

Tableau has a wide range of features which makes it a better choice over other BI tools. Some of these are as follows:

• Tableau Dashboard: Tableau dashboard has an intuitive dashboard with self-explaining wizards, allowing non-technical users to create visualization easily. Dimensions, charts are simple drag and drop on drawing space to perform analysis.
• Collaborative Sharing:  Tableau allows users to collaborate with their peers for collaborative work or review. Users can also share to the cloud, which makes the dashboard accessible from anywhere.
• Data Sources in Tableau: Tableau has more than 200+ connectors that help users connect to external data sources like RDBMS, Cloud, spreadsheet, etc., securely. Tableau also provides several monitoring features such as data connectivity, auto-refresh, etc. 
• Advanced Visualizations (Chart Types): Tableau has a vast collection of advanced visualization techniques. Some of them are:
  • Charts
  • Tables
  • Graphs
  • Maps
• Advanced Methods to Visualize Data: Some methods to visualize data in Tableau are:
  • Area Chart
  • Bar Chart
  • Box and Whisker Plots
  • Bubble Cloud
  • Cartogram
  • Dot Distribution Map
  • Heat Map

To learn more about Tableau, click this link.

Introduction to Tableau Reporting

Tableau is a widely used BI tool that is used to collect, analyze, and visualize the data. Tableau Reporting is a process of extracting information from raw data and converting it into appealing visuals like charts, graphs, etc. Tableau is relatively easy to use, and anyone can use it to create reports and perform data analysis without having much technical knowledge.

Tableau Reporting can be used to check data trends, forecast the data by slicing as per requirements, and be of any form like PDF, Tables, CSV, Dashboards, etc.

Advantages of Tableau Reporting

Tableau is a highly interactive visualization tool used for organizing data in a particular way. The advantages offered by tableau reporting are,

• User-Friendly Interface: Tableau offers a user-friendly interface, making it an easy-to-use tool for both technical and non-technical users. Users can seamlessly create interactive dashboards using drag-and-drop features in Tableau. 
• Creating Highly Interactive Dashboards: A Tableau reporting tool allows users to create highly interactive and dynamic dashboards. Users can analyze data, apply filters, and explore further specific details to enhance the overall user experience.
• Scalability and efficiency: Tableau reporting tool is scalable, which can handle large datasets and complex analytics. Its performance remains efficient when dealing with any type of data- small or large.
• Cost-effective Licensing: Tableau offers a free version of software called Tableau Public and it may not be as efficient as Tableau in dealing with large datasets.

Steps to Build Tableau Reports

Building Tableau Reports is a simple process. In this section, we will walk you through a step-by-step process to produce reports in Tableau. You can learn about how to create a report in Tableau. You can build Tableau Reports by following the below steps:

• Step 1: Launch Tableau Worksheet
• Step 2: Apply Dimension and Measures
• Step 3: Create a Dashboard
• Step 4: Share the Dashboard

Step 1: Launch Tableau Worksheet

A Tableau worksheet is a vast infinite canvas that holds all the charts, dashboards, and reports. Along with canvas, it has all the tools and functionalities to enable users to analyze the data and create appealing reports. A view of the Tableau worksheet is shown as below:

Let’s discuss the various sections shown in the above image:

1. Data Pane – The data pane shows all the fields from the data that are connected to Tableau
2. Measures – It shows all the available types of measurements like Profit, Loss, Sum, etc.
3. Dimensions – It contains all the dimensions fields from the data source like Id, Date, Category, etc.
4. Columns and Rows – The column and rows section allows you to drag and drop the dimensions and measures to create visuals or reports. Fields in the row will be displayed vertically, whereas the fields in the columns are displayed horizontally. 
5. Marks – The marks section contains various options to make visuals interactive and presentable. Options like colour, size, text, label, etc. It also has the opportunity to customize from the Marks card.
6. Filters – This allows users to apply filters to the data as per requirements.
7. Data Sources – Data Source allows you to add new data sources, manage data and handle the data at the source level.
8. Show Me – This section contains various visuals like pie charts, bar graphs, maps, histograms, etc.

Step 2: Apply Dimension and Measures

To add dimension and measures in your Tableau Reports, drag and drop dimensions and measures to rows and column sections. After adding dimensions and measure, you can select different visuals like histogram, pie chart, bar graph, etc. This is shown below.

Step 3: Create a Dashboard

Dashboards are the collection of different visuals that are combined to provide the complete report from data. By creating a dashboard, business users can understand the insights from data with the help of a map, tables, charts, etc. 

The dashboard also allows you to interact with visuals by applying filters on a set of values to see trends and perform time series analysis. This is shown below.

Creating a dashboard for your Tableau Reports is a straightforward process. You can open the dashboard from the dashboard tab and start adding visuals to it. Visuals can be added by drag and drop and adjust according to the need.

A sample dashboard is shown below.

Step 4: Share the Dashboard

Once the dashboard is completed, you can share that with peers and colleagues to perform reviews. This is shown below.

That’s it! You have successfully created your first Tableau Report!

Instances of Implementing Tableau Reporting

Let’s consider a dataset containing information about sales in a retail store, and you want to create a tableau report to analyze and visualize the data. Using Tableau reporting, you can get insights on data like,

• How many products got sold in a month?
• What is the frequently purchased product?
• What is the least purchased product?
• What is the revenue per year?
• Number of times a customer visited the store?

These are a few instances where you can analyze the store data using Tableau reporting.

Difficulties encountered by Tableau

Tableau also comes with some limitations,

• Creating essential reports to replace extensive Excel reports and tables, which primarily aids in the management and growth of retail business.
• Tableau’s effectiveness lies in the quality of data. Challenges related to data quality or inconsistencies may affect the accuracy of data visualizations.

Conclusion

This article provided you a comprehensive guide on building Tableau Reports for your organization. It also gave a brief overview of Tableau and its features and also introduced the process of Tableau Reporting. Overall, Tableau Reports are an innovative technology through which companies can better understand their customers and check if they are on-par with their goals. By building Tableau Reports, you can visualize almost any data seamlessly on Tableau.

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