more dashboards and workbooks that you can download and explore. This is a great way to get ideas for your own work.
The Discover Pane
On the right side of the Start page, you will find online learning resources that are provided by Tableau Software. This pane is divided into three sections: Training, Viz of the Week, and Resources.
Training (View All)
The most popular training videos are displayed in this space. Clicking the (view all) option will take you to Tableau’s training and tutorials website that includes links to all of Tableaus training resources. These include a large library of free On-Demand training videos, a schedule of upcoming live web training sessions that are also free, and a schedule of Tableau’s Public training classes, which are fee-based. In addition, you will find links to quick-start guides, starter kits, knowledge base articles, and other learning resources. The content in this area continues to change and expand.
Viz of the Week
Tableau offers a free hosting service that allows data nerds who also blog to share visualizations. This service is called Tableau Public. The Viz of the Week is selected from the best examples provided by the Tableau Public user community. Clicking the Viz of the Week takes you to the Tableau Public website and the winning visualization. Normally Tableau provides a link to the website or blog that the dashboard appeared. You can also download the workbook to your computer for further analysis. This is a great way to learn.
Resources
At the bottom of the Discover pane, you’ll find links to recent Tableau blog posts, Tableau news, the Tableau Conference website, and the excellent Tableau community forums. One of the best aspects of the Tableau world is the community of users who share technique. As Tableau’s website has grown in size and scope, it can be challenging to find what you need. The Resources area provides shortcuts to these resources right from your desktop. Keep in mind that you need a live Internet connection to access these files.
Now that you’ve learned about Tableau’s Start page, it’s time to dive into some data. In the next section, you learn about Tableau’s primary connection and analysis environment – the sheet workspace.
The Tableau Desktop Workspace
Figure 1-6 contains a sheet view of a connection to one of the sample files that ships with Tableau Desktop: the Sample-Superstore Sales-Excel dataset. Tableau updates these sample files often. Once again, the companion website (see Appendix F) includes a zip file containing the workbooks used to create the examples in this book. If you want to follow along with these examples, download the file for Chapter 1.
Figure 1-6: Tableau Desktop sheet workspace
The sheet workspace is where you build views. Tableau Desktop also has a dedicated workspace for dashboard building, which is covered in Chapter 8, and for creating stories, which is covered in Chapter 10. Figure 1-6 shows a sheet containing a scatter plot. The Superstore dataset includes sales data for a retail business.
You can open as many connections as you want in Tableau by clicking the home icon to open the Connect page. There are a several other ways you can establish a data connection, as you will learn in Chapter 2. The remainder of Chapter 1 covers the different parts of the workspace displayed in Figure 1-6.
The toolbar areas at the top of the sheet view contain the menu bar, the icon bar, and the Show Me button.
The Sheet Sorter
At the bottom right of the workspace in Figure 1-6 are three icons. The left-most icon in the group is a cluster of nine squares. Clicking the Show Sheet Sorter icon will display all of the contents of the workbook. Figure 1-7 shows the Sheet Sorter view.
The Sheet Sorter resembles a PowerPoint slide desk sorter view. In the Sheet Sorter, you can reorder worksheets, dashboards, and stories by dragging the images to the desired position. Double-clicking any image in the Sheet Sorter will open that view.
You can also use the Sheet Sorter to preload the contents of your workbook into memory. This is particularly helpful if you are using Tableau to give a live presentation. By preloading everything into memory, transitions between each sheet, dashboard, or story will be immediate. Preload all the workbook contents into memory by right-clicking while pointing anywhere in the Sheet Sorter and selecting the Refresh All Thumbnails option.
Show Filmstrip and Show Tabs Icons
Tableau normally displays tabs at the bottom of the workspace, but you can change that presentation. Immediately to the right of the slide sorter icon in Figure 1-6 are two additional icons – Show Filmstrip and Show Tabs. With these icons, you can toggle between each type of display. Figure 1-8 shows the Filmstrip and Tab displays.
The upper part of Figure 1-8 is the Tab view. On the bottom is the Filmstrip view. Experiment with each method to see how the presentation of the sheets changes. If you hover your mouse over the tabs, an image of the sheet contents is displayed as well.
Figure 1-7: The Sheet Sorter
Return to the Start page by clicking the Tableau logo icon you see in Figure 1-8 in the upper-left side of the workspace. Note that you can also refresh all thumbnails to preload every sheet from the Filmstrip, just as in the Sheet Sorter.
Right-clicking a tab for the Filmstrip icon exposes a context-specific menu option relating to the tab. Notice that you can color-encode tabs from this menu, duplicate the tab, or export the sheet to create a new workbook. Try experimenting with the other menu options exposed when you do this. You’ll find that right-clicking any object in Tableau always exposes context-specific menu options.
Figure 1-8: Show Tabs and Show Filmstrip
What You Need to Know About the Toolbar Menu
At the very top of the sheet workspace in Figure 1-6 is the menu. Once again, the appearance of the menu is slightly different on Windows and the Mac, but both Desktop editions contain the same menu options.
As Tableau Desktop has matured, many options that used to be accessible only from the menu have migrated closer to the workspace. Described in the following sections are those options that are accessed primarily or only via the main menu. The text that follows ignores the menu items that are more easily accomplished with other methods or that are very rarely utilized. You can find more details regarding the toolbar in Tableau’s online manual found in the Help menu.7
File Menu
Like any Windows program, the File menu contains New, Open, Save, and Save As functions. The Export Packaged Workbook option allows you to create a packaged workbook (.twbx) quickly. Saving your workbook this way eliminates a couple of clicks versus the more commonly used File/Save As method.
The most frequently used feature found in this menu is the Print to PDF option (a Print menu option on the Mac). This allows you to export your worksheet or dashboard in PDF form. If you can’t remember where Tableau places files or you want to change the default file-save location, use the Repository Location menu option to review and change it.
Data Menu
The Paste Data option is handy in a couple of ways. You can use this if you find some interesting tabular data on a website