Tableau Fundamentals

Tableau is a visual analytics platform for exploring data and communicating findings. An author connects to data, gives tables and fields analytical meaning, builds views on worksheets, combines views into dashboards, and publishes workbooks for other people. Tableau's defining idea is VizQL: dragging fields into a view becomes a query and a visual specification. The chart is therefore the visible end of a query path, not a picture detached from its data.

A typical path looks like this:

files, databases, or published data
    -> Tableau data source
    -> worksheet shelves and Marks card
    -> generated query
    -> marks in a view
    -> dashboard or story
    -> Tableau Cloud, Server, or Public

Tableau Desktop is the primary authoring application. Tableau Cloud is a hosted service for web authoring, publishing, sharing, refresh, and governance. Tableau Server provides a customer-managed deployment. Tableau Public is a free public publishing environment; content and underlying data there must be suitable for public access. Tableau Prep supports visual data cleaning and shaping before analysis.

Data sources and connections

A Tableau data source is more than a database connection. It includes connection details, tables, relationships or joins, field names, calculations, aliases, default formatting, and other semantics used by a workbook. A workbook can contain multiple data sources, and a published data source can be reused across workbooks.

Connections are live or extracted. A live connection sends queries to the source when a view needs results. Its freshness and response time depend on the source, network, credentials, and query workload. An extract stores a compressed snapshot in Tableau's Hyper format. Views query the snapshot, so source changes appear after the extract refreshes. Extracts can improve interaction speed and support offline authoring, but refresh becomes an operational dependency.

Tableau Fundamentals

Data sources and connections

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