As someone who lived in Microsoft Excel for the past 20 years with my needs met, I have not needed to pick up new spreadsheet / data reporting software skills. Now, it seems like Excel skills are not that special anymore. So it’s time.
Enter Tableau: a robust tool for data analysis, reporting and the all-important thing that executives especially love: pretty visuals.
I went through the initial tutorial, all six videos, navigating through an impressive toolkit of menus, sub-menus, options and filters.
Not since I used Shopify and Google Analytics have I thought much about a “dashboard.” Now I know how to build my own.
The tutorial steps through warehouse sales by segment and category. The idea is you have a large list of sales orders and can analyze them by slicing and dicing the data. Slicing by state is a cool feature because Tableau comes with impressive map visuals. This allows an international company to analyze metrics by country and smaller but national companies to analyze by states or regions. Unfortunately the data source for the tutorial doesn’t resemble realistic real world data: a vacuum sold for $1.39, wow!. So, it’s not meant for a further analysis.
Here is the published viz on Tableau.
In my brief stint with sales and marketing consulting, I was more focused on process than analytics but I did use the Shopify and Google Analytics dashboards frequently. Now I’m wondering in retrospect if there was enough sales volume to do a larger analysis. I’m not so sure Tableau or reporting software this robust fit our needs at the time but I’m sure there may have been some value.
Once you set your visuals based on your initial data import and create your dashboards, Tableau makes periodic data analysis a breeze. I could see how this would be amazing for internal team presentations of several people or more. I think with certain external partners, this could also work but there may be other pieces of software that integrate with Tableau.
I will be exploring that more in the near future.