REFLECTION: THE ANATOMY OF A TABLEAU VISUALIZATION

Even beginners can quickly create a first chart in Tableau, either using the Show Me assistant or by dragging fields onto the canvas area. The preceding pages of this chapter are meant to provide step‐by‐step instructions to use the most common chart types in a typical business context.

However, Tableau's clever user interface allows you to go much further. More advanced users can create many other types of visualizations with only a few clicks, once they have internalized the rules by which Tableau puts together the charts from different building blocks.

You may have noticed, for example, that by default, Tableau aggregates the values of the measures used in a view. The default aggregation function is the sum of all values—but this can be changed. (We'll discuss more details of the different aggregation functions in Chapter 4.)

You can control the level of aggregation by adding dimensions to the view, to...