Building Tableau Reports: A Comprehensive Guide

• April 29th, 2021

Data Visualization and Reporting are essential features in today’s data-driven world. Tableau is one of the leading and widely used BI tools in the industry. Tableau helps organizations understand their customer needs and help them survive in a competitive market. Organizations can use Tableau to build Tableau Reports that helps them analyze their customer requirements seamlessly.

Tableau Reports are an in-built feature of Tableau and help 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 and its features. Read along to understand how you can build Tableau Reports for your organization.

Table of Contents

Introduction to Tableau

Tableau Logo
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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.

Tableau Products
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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.

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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 build Tableau Reports by following the below steps:

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:

Tableau Worksheet
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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.

Dimensions and Measures on Tableau Reports
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Measures of Tableau Reports
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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 Dashboards
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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.

Sample Dashboard
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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.

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

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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Share your experience of Building Tableau Reports in the comments section below!

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