Week 7 - BALT 4361 - Fun with Tableau

 Chapter 8 demonstrated the power of visualizing your data. Numbers by themselves are data, but when you start to organize those numbers into graphs, dashboards, and trends you begin to turn that data into information. I love how Tableau allows you to easily identify patterns, comparisons, and time series. It drove home to me the importance of presentation when it comes to making business decisions. Analyzing your data is great, but only if it can be done in an easy to read and understand format.

My favorite part of this chapter was learning about how Tableau is extremely easy to use, yet still has robust features. With just a few clicks you can drag and drop fields to create powerful visualizations. I also love all of the features that Tableau has such as blending data, creating calculated fields, inserting trend lines, and creating interactive dashboards. I love how the stock market example and UFO example from this chapter took a simple set of data and turned it into something you can really interact with. Rather than looking at numbers in a spreadsheet you can filter and manipulate that data to identify trends and patterns.

Since this is the last chapter in the course, it serves as a great culmination of everything we have learned. We talked about how to collect data, how to analyze it, and how it can be used for business purposes. Tableau is the last step in the process. Taking your analysis and making it presentable. I feel as though this chapter did a great job of showing me how to present my data.



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