Learn how to navigate Tableau’s online platform, from signing in and accessing dashboards to creating visualizations and connecting data sources. Understand the key differences between the desktop application and the free online version to determine the right tool for your needs.
Key Insights
- Tableau offers two versions of its platform: a desktop application and a free online version accessible at public.tableau.com, where users can create and share interactive visualizations without a paid subscription.
- Users can sign into the online version to view trending visualizations, access previous work, and begin new projects by uploading data files such as CSVs or connecting to sources like Google Drive or OData.
- Noble Desktop’s training includes demonstrations of both Tableau application features and the online version, showing how visualizations can be customized, published, and embedded or shared publicly.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
Now, let me open up Tableau. I should make sure I have it installed on this computer or else it'll take a long time. You'll get delayed.
You'll be frustrated. Why? Why does he have to install? He didn't. Didn't he know he was teaching the class? So here it is.
It's opening up and I can say skip this update. I'm not going to do an update now. I can install the update when I quit.
But for the sake of time, let me just take a look at what version I have. Well, I'll update because it's good for me to show you what the update process looks like if any of you need to do the update process and you'll have it on video. But I do have Tableau and it's recommended here that I update to 25.1.2. I'll come back to that.
I can go back to my PowerPoint and talk to you some more. There are two versions of Tableau. There's the online version and there's the application version.
So this is what you don't have in your slide. There's the animation and I have these images to try to make it very simple for you to understand what we're going to do. The online version, you should go to public.tableau.com. That's where you'll sign in.
If you go to tableau.com, you'll see something about a seven-day free trial. That means seven days of freedom until they hit your credit card. And if you have the money, no problem, but you want to use the online version.
Now, I'm going to pretend I just signed into the online version because I have a screenshot to show you what it looks like when you sign into the online version. So I don't have to do it live, but I should do it live. If I go in here, then you're this.
There's a little profile logo that you'll click on and then you'll be able to sign into your account. So you want to click profile. And when you click profile, you get this screen.
This is one of the other instructors in our class who teaches this. I took a screenshot of his profile page. This is his dashboard that he created and uploaded to his profile.
He has 69. So he's been creating lots of visualizations. You can add your own picture and banner.
That wasn't done here. And so you can create your visualization right from here. All you do is click create viz.
And then when you do that, well, I talked first about the fact you can see your existing visualizations. I'm going to go back to clicking the button. Create a viz.
Oh, I guess didn't show you the screenshot of what it looks like. So let me sign in myself because it shouldn't take too long. I'm just going to come out of the browser.
I was prepared for this because I know that signing in is a problem if you don't have your password. So I saved my password in the PowerPoint and then I will come out of the PowerPoint and show you a live version of the online version of Tableau. So let's do Edge.
I'll open up Microsoft Edge. I'll go to public.tableau.com and this is what the starting page looks like. You can see trending visualizations and there's always a visualization of the day.
At the time of this recording, this is the visualization of the day. So they show you a new one each time and you may draw inspiration from these visualizations of the day. And so if you go here, you'll see the past visualizations of the day.
There's one for every day. So let's see what this one looks like. A good visualization should quickly give you a sense of what you're looking at.
And so here's how your LinkedIn posts influence your overall following. So it looks like it's an analysis of LinkedIn followers based on what people are posting. And I guess it's across the whole platform.
There are these little buttons that you can click on and that should change the visualizations that you see here. This is month to date, year to date. And so that's the benefit of using Tableau.
It's very easy to interact with this information. It's not like a PDF with just an image and then you can't really do anything with it. You can actually navigate and view the information and interact with it.
They have these little buttons here. You can share this with other people. You can embed it into your website.
You can click a link. Some people will allow you to actually download their visualizations and you can run it from your public Tableau application. There's a PowerPoint and PDF versions, but those are basically screenshots.
There's an image version and so on. So let me sign in just so I could do a live version of what you saw. So there's my email.
It's different. All right, now let me get my password that I was so organized to save in my PowerPoint. Yay, I'm nice and organized.
See, I'm not taking too long. I'm going to sign in and I am in my account. I'm not going to save my password.
I actually have my name here. This is the icon I talked about in the screenshot. I'm going to click my profile.
When I click my profile, you can see my visualizations from other classes that I've taught. Here's the April 10th class. Here's a dashboard and this is something I guess I was just playing around with.
You can have followers. You can have people follow you. You can follow other people.
You can customize the banner. You can add your own picture. I should add my own picture at some point.
If you're using the online version, this is what you'll do. You'll sign in. I don't have to pay any money.
It's completely free and so are all my visualizations. They're free for anyone to look at. Companies that pay don't want their information hosted on other people's servers.
So people who pay for the software have the ability to host their visualizations quote on-prem, on-premises. So they have their own cloud, their own personal email server. If I click create viz, welcome to Tableau online.
This is the online version of Tableau. Now the first thing they're expecting you to do is add in data that you want to connect to work on your visualizations. Let's see.
We have connectors here. You can connect to Google Drive information or OData. But here you would drag like a CSV or an Excel file so that you could start working with your visualization.
Garfield, could you hide this? Could you show me what the application looks like? I want to see it. Okay, I'm going to close this. This is like the application.
Here's a data source. Well, the data source is a little different from on the desktop. If you want to bring that window back up again, you click this button.
Click this button. Now you can go back to bringing in your information. So some of the same things I do on the desktop, you can do here on the online version.
And then you'll publish to save your changes as you're working on this. Thank you.