Today, organizations collect vast amounts of information to inform their decisions and discoveries and to edge ahead of rivals. But the vast majority have difficulty extracting meaningful data from the unstructured and structured information they’ve accumulated.
A recent study unveiled that 53% of respondents stated that their IT team lacks expertise or the staff to gain valuable insights from the data. Furthermore, fifty percent of respondents lack the necessary tools to provide downstream applications with current relevant data, and 44 % do not have the time or resources to go through the data.
However, 31.3% stated that they hadn’t seen enough investment in platforms that could streamline the data analysis process.
Add it all up, and the numbers demonstrate the need for solutions like Tableau, an innovative platform for business intelligence and data visualization.
Tableau was purchased from Salesforce in June of 2019 for $15.7 billion. This is the largest acquisition of Salesforce to this point. Fully joined with Salesforce, Tableau is the leading market player in software for data visualization and an essential tool for any Data Science team.
What exactly is Tableau?
Tableau is a software platform that allows for locating, preparing, visualizing, sharing, and sharing data. It’s highly flexible and employed by data science teams in all industries.
The Tableau product line has four significant products: Tableau Prep for preparing data, Tableau Desktop for delivering insight across the enterprise, and Tableau Server/Online to host and share data.
The company also offers additional add-ons (e.g., Tableau Data Management and Server Management), embedded analytics, and tools for developers like webhooks to facilitate advanced integrations, customizations, and automation.
Tableau for Data Science.
Despite its popularity, Tableau doesn’t represent all the tools data scientists use at present. Data science is an extended field with many areas of study, which is why analytics teams typically employ various tools to accomplish data science goals..
Data scientists typically require breaking down data to make it more digestible by internal team members, executives at the C-level, colleagues, and customers. Therefore, data needs to be organized in a manner that is easy to read and understand. That’s the place where Tableau excels.
With the help of Tableau analytics, teams can go into the depths of data, discover undiscovered insights, and then present their conclusions in a manner that tells a highly visually captivating story. Tableau can be used for swiftly looking through data, cutting and dicing it, and creating an engaging, collaborative, and visually appealing presentation.
Another reason Tableau is so well-known is that it can connect to various types of sources for data. For instance, teams can connect Tableau to cloud-based systems such as Azure and Google BigQuery, relational systems such as SQL Server or Oracle, and file systems such as Excel and CSV.
Tableau as a Data Science Enabler
The use of Tableau helps analytics teams understand and present information and, as a result, improves the collective skills of data scientists. It’s also great for quickly making reports whenever needed, without needing to build them manually.
Tableau isn’t the best choice for every data project. Some programmers prefer using tools such as Gggplot2 (for the R language)) as well as the pandas open source library (for Python), for instance. These tools provide more flexibility. However, as with all things, they come with certain drawbacks.
“Sometimes you don’t know or remember the codes to show data in a particular manner,” Jason Widjaja, the associate director of global data science of MSD, recently wrote on Quora. “Sometimes, the data format can be difficult. However, Tableau provides an interface. It is also worth noting that Tableau is an industry-leading tool. It’s not particularly notable in terms of its functionality. However, it is a leader because of its wide coverage, and there’s an increased likelihood that you’ll encounter it.”
Ultimately, it’s essential to continue learning and exploring new ways to visualize data.
“Tableau itself is an instrument. It is a tool only,” Widjaja continues. “It is the primary goal of data visualization correctly that will help you become a better data scientist, not getting a specific data visualization tool like Tableau or other. Data visualization allows you to explore the data to determine its structure and structure, then present your conclusions in a clear and easily understood manner with the brain’s pre-processing ability that begins far before any conscious thought is even thought of and aids in the sale of your ideas to help fund your analytics and data science unit.”
Get Started Using Tableau
Beginning Tableau is not as complex as it sounds, even for novices. Tableau’s robust learning community includes free training videos, live training sessions, and Tableau Certification programs. Visit their website to get access to Tableau’s resources for learning.
Additionally, Tableau provides free access to Tableau Prep Builder and Tableau Desktop for teachers and students across the globe. Creating information for presentations, lectures, and thesis projects is simple. Also, if you are planning your career in Tableau, prepare yourself with Tableau Interview Questions.
Data Transformation remains a challenge.
The introduction of Tableau Prep offers a more flexible and automated method of preparing data to blend and transform it – to be used for analysis using Tableau. However, Tableau Prep has significant limitations, and Tableau Prep, particularly for data science.
SaaS Data Transformation is the first in the market to offer a collaborative multi-persona, a multi-persona platform for data transformation that is integrated into Snowflake. The multi-persona UI is entirely free of code, low-code, Code (SQL) tools that bring together all your team members – Data engineers, analysts, analysts, and data scientists- on one platform to transform and analyze data. Data documentation resembling a catalog and knowledge sharing helps build confidence in crowdsourced data and data governance. Direct integration with Snowflake protects data and reduces costs thanks to Snowflake’s scalable computing and storage capabilities.
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