When your data needs to get dressed up, Tableau is a fool-proof style service. It offers a sleek, drag-and-drop interface for data analytics with native integration to pull data from CSVs, JSON files, Google Sheets, SQL databases, and that back corner of the dryer where you’ve inevitably forgotten a sock.

Data is automatically separated into dimensions (qualitative) and measures (quantitative) — and presumed to be ready for chart-making. Of course, if there are still a few data cleaning steps to be undertaken, Tableau can handle the dirty laundry as well. For example, it supports re-formatting data types and pivoting data from wide to tall format.
When ready to make a chart, simply ctrl+click features of interest and an option from the “Show me” box of defaults. This simplicity of interaction enables even the most design-impaired data scientist to easily marshal data into a presentable format. Tableau will put your data into a suit and tie and send it to the boardroom.
Follow these tips to go from “good” to “great” in your data visualization abilities
#1 — Sheets are the artist’s canvas and dashboards are the gallery wall. Sheets are for creating the artwork (ahem, charts), which you will then position onto a dashboard (using a tiled layout with containers — more on this in a second) along with any formatting elements.
#2 — To save yourself time, set Default Properties for dimensions and measures. This will provide a unified approach to color, number of decimal points, sort order, etc. and prevent you from having to fiddle with these settings each time you go to use a given field.
#3 — Along those lines, make use of the overarching Format Workbook and Format Dashboard options instead of one-off formatting tweaks.
#4 — Avoid floating objects in your dashboards. Dragging charts around becomes a headache once you have more than two or three to work with. You can make your legends floating objects, but otherwise stay away from this “long-cut.”
Instead, use the tiled layout, which forces objects to snap into place and automatically resizes if you change the size dimensions of your dashboard. Much faster and simpler in the long run.