Tableau Cheat Sheet

Last updated on 08th Oct 2020, Blog, Tutorials

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Tableau is one of the hottest tools for data visualizations and data interpretation. Having a handy reference, containing all the basics of Tableau Desktop will only make your work easier, faster and spare you some time while working with Tableau.

Keeping that in mind, we at Intellipaat have come up with this tableau desktop Cheat Sheet for you to make your experience with Tableau even better.

This cheat sheet has been designed, assuming that you have a basic idea about what is Tableau and why is it used. This cheat sheet will provide you all the basics of Tableau desktop that you need to know to get started with Tableau

Tableau connects to all popular types of data sources, you can perform management tasks on the data sources:

File Systems	CSV, Excel, etc.
Relational Systems	Oracle, Sql Server, DB2, etc.
Cloud Systems	Windows Azure, Google BigQuery, etc.
Other Sources	ODBC

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Data Extract:

Extracts of tableau data is a compressed snapshot of the data. You can use these extracts to employ a tableau functionality that is not available or supported in the original data.

Extraction of data is done by following:

Menu → Data → Extract Data.

Applying Extract Filters to create subsets of data.

Data →Extract Data →Filter →select from the list

To add more data for an already created extract:

Data → Extract → Append Data from File

Extract History:

Menu – Data → Extract History

Data Joining:

Sometimes you will need to join data from different sources or tables in order to perform data analysis tasks. Tableau also provides the following data joining functionalities:

Creating a Join
Editing a Join Type
Editing Join Fields

Data Blending:

Tableau also provides data blending functionality. You can use this feature if you find that there is related data in different data sources and you want to analyze all that related data together in a single view

Preparing Data for Blending
Adding Secondary Data Source
Blending the Data

Operators:

Tableau has a few operators as well. Operators are used to perform logical or mathematical manipulations. In tableau, these operators help create calculated fields and formulae.

General Operators
Arithmetic Operators
Relational Operators
Logical Operators

LOD Expressions:

Tableau introduced level of detail expressions or LOD expressions. LOD gives even more control over data on the data source level

Fixed LOD
Include LOD
Exclude LOD

Sorting:

You can also perform sorting on your data in Tableau using following two ways of sorting:

Computed Sorting: Directly applied on an axis using the sort dialog button.
Manual Sorting: Rearrange the order of dimension fields by dragging them next to each other.

Filters:

As discussed above, you can use filters in your extracted data, mainly to restrict the number of records you want to work on. There are multiple filters available in Tableau based on the type of purpose of these filters

Types	Work
Filter DimensionsFilter MeasuresFilter DatesSingle Value (List)Single Value (Dropdown)Multiple Values (List)Multiple Values (Dropdown)Multiple Values (Custom List)Single Value (Slider)Wildcard Match	Applied on the dimension fields.Applied on the measure fields.Applied on the date fields.Select one value at a time in a list.Select a single value in a drop-down list.Select one or more values in a list.Select one or more values in a drop-down list.Search and select one or more values.Drag a horizontal slider to select a single value.Select values containing the specified characters.

Tableau Charts:

In Tableau, you can create different interactive visuals for data interpretation. Following is the list of Tableau charts along with their description:

Type	Description
Text Table (Crosstab)	To see your data in rows and columns.
Heat Map	Just like Crosstab, but it uses size and color as visual cues to describe the data.
Highlight Table	Just like Excel tables, but the cells here are colored.
Symbol Map	Visualize and highlight geographical data.
Filled Map	Color filled geographical data visualization.
Pie Chart	Represents data as slices of a circle with different sizes and colors.
Horizontal Bar Chart	Represents data in horizontal bars, visually digestible.
Stacked Bar Chart	Visualize data of a category having sub-categories.
Side-by-Side Bar Chart	Side by side comparison of data, vertical representation.
Treemap	Similar to a heat map, but the boxes are grouped by items that are close in hierarchy.
Circle View	Shows the different values that are within the categories.
Side-by-Side Circle View fields)	Combination of Circle view and Side-by-Side Bar Chart
Line Chart (Continuous)	Several numbers of lines in the view to show continuous flow of data, must have a date.
Line Chart (Discrete)	This allows slicing and dicing of the graph, graph not continuous.
Dual Line Chart	Comparing two measures over a period.
Scatter Plot	Scatter plot shows many points scattered in the Cartesian plane
Histogram	A histogram represents the frequencies of values of a variable bucketed into ranges
Gantt Chart	It illustrates a project schedule.
Bullet Graph	Two bars drawn upon one another to indicate their individual values at the same position in the graph
Waterfall Chart	It shows where a value starts, ends and how it gets there incrementally

That would be all for this tableau Desktop cheat sheet. If you are interested in data analysis and business intelligence then learning Tableau is a smart choice for you. Check out the Tableau training and certification provided by Intellipaat where you will get to learn data visualizations and building tableau dashboards and prepare yourself for the industry by going through this top Tableau Interview Questions and Answers! In this Tableau certification training you will also learn Tableau desktop and public integration with R & Big data. You can reach out to us in case you have any queries and we will be there to help you with that, at no extra cost!

Tableau User Handbook