Data Analytics and Visualization with Tableau
Getting Started
Please follow the steps below so you can participate in the hands-on session.
1. Sign up for Tableau Public
Go to https://public.tableau.com/auth/signup and create an account.
Goal
Create an interactive dashboard to explore facilities' toxic releases and greenhouse gas emissions across the U.S.
Summary
We’ll use EPA and EIA datasets to study trends in facility GHG emissions, toxic releases, and power plant output throughout the U.S. We’ll incorporate Tableau GIS mapping & analysis to generate an interactive dashboard. Participants will be trained on basic Tableau functionality including dimensions / measures, graph types (1-D through 4-D), basic mapping, filters, and creating groups. Then, users will be trained on advanced functionality including merging data sources, creating calculated measures, trend lines, quick calculations, and dashboards.
What is Tableau?
Tableau is a data visualization and analytics platform used by thousands of companies to understand their data. Tableau offers an intuitive, drag-and-drop user interface to build interactive graphs in order to quickly generate insights.
Additional Resources
Tableau's Getting Started Guide
Tableau's Starter Kit - tutorials and guide for beginners
Tableau's student resources page - Download the software and receive a free student license here
About Data Cleaning...
Tableau runs better when data is in a long data format, as opposed to wide data format. The data used in this tutorial is already good to go, but if you're working with your own data you should read up on these articles. (And, probably learn R's Reshape2 package.)
Tableau's guide to cleaning Excel data
Example of data that's too wide
Example of data that's too long
R Help file on reshape2, explains long vs wide data formats
THE academic article from the maker of the reshape2 package: how to tidy your data