It’s used by thousands of corporations as a Business Intelligence/Analytics tool to visualize their data. Tableau is a powerful tool but also a great way of starting to think about key concepts in interactivity: about how to use filters, buttons, navigation tool tips or exploratory dashboards to let readers dive deep in your content.
We actually use it for print graphics as well after saving files as PDFs. Tableau is a great exploratory tool that lets you quickly evaluate different options to visualize you data. We use Tableau during the workshop because it doesn’t require the coding skills necessary to use sophisticated tools such as D3.js, the tool behind many of those amazing interactives of The New York Times and others (although today you can code a nice data visualization in R, for example, with just a few lines of code). The newest version (Tableau 10) was released three months ago and has really nice improvements including a long overdue addition of device responsiveness to visualize data across multiple devices. Tableau is a great first step for those interested in data visualization online since it’s fairly easy to learn.
Our Infographics and Data Visualization workshops always include spending a few hours using the free Tableau Publicsoftware to create interactive data visualizations with charts and maps on the web.
