The Tableau platform overview - Tableau Tutorial

- [Instructor] Tableau is a business intelligence platform. What does that mean? Let's take the term platform out of that statement and start by explaining the term business intelligence. Say you have a corner shop in your neighborhood. Every day, they make sales of various items. Those sales are recorded every time someone visits the store. In order for that corner shop to be successful, they need to have a good understanding of what products sell well, what products don't sell, and what products they could sell but don't yet sell. This requires data from multiple sources including external data they buy or find online. Once this data is stored securely on a fairly frequent basis, the business owner will evaluate this data by bringing it together and analyzing it. You and I both know that data isn't always perfect so it might need treatment to fix mistakes or make it line up with the analysis they're trying to do. Once that's done, you can review the figures and try and gain some insight into what to do next. This might form part of a short or long term strategy and as a result, you might also get some targets or goals to evaluate on a monthly or quarterly basis. You'll most likely do this in the form of a report that makes it easy to see the high level information but also digs deep into more granular aspects if needs be. As new sales comes in, this contributes to new rows in your dataset, and the process repeats itself. That cycle is what we call business intelligence. In short, it's the process where businesses combine the activities of collecting data, finding data, data visualization and data tools alongside best practice to help make better data-driven decisions. It's an important process because it allows businesses to make better decisions in a repeatable, efficient, and predictable way, allowing them to benchmark themselves or identify opportunities to grow or compete in a world where trends and opportunities change and move very quickly. If we now bring back the term platform, a business intelligence platform simply brings together the various tools needed to enable the activities required in the business intelligence process. Tableau's not the only BI platform. It's a crowded place, but it's definitely one of the most established and mature platforms designed to help businesses scale their data culture and enable faster time to insight as the demand for data-driven and data informed businesses grow. The Tableau platform has three distinct components covering the BI lifecycle, Tableau Desktop, Tableau Prep Builder, and Tableau Cloud, or Tableau Server. Tableau Cloud was previously called Tableau Online. We have explanations for each of these coming up so for now I'll keep these high level. Each of these plays a unique role in the BI lifecycle. Additionally, there's a host of products and capabilities in the platform that you can use to enhance the way the platform works. The products you can use and the depth to which you can use them are controlled by the level of access you have and that's managed by your license and your Tableau role in the Tableau platform. Tableau has three main license types to enable this, creators, explorers, and viewers. Each of these have different levels of access and capability throughout the platform. I'll add a link to a resource that explains this in more detail, but let's cover them briefly to give you a flavor of how they work. The Tableau Creator gets full access to all three parts of the platform and is designed for those who create analytical content for themselves and for others to consume. The Tableau Viewer can view and interact with the content created by a creator. In essence, these users are mostly consuming content already curated for them, and largely use a very guided experience to access and analyze data. As such, the only part of the platform they get access to is Tableau Cloud or Tableau Server. The Tableau Explorer is sort of a halfway house between a viewer and a creator and does sometimes cause a bit of confusion. The only tool you have access to is still Tableau Server and Tableau Cloud. However, some parts of the creator experience are made available to you through a web-based experience so you can create your own reports and dashboards but the ability to do that is more limited. You can also help administer content on Tableau Cloud or Tableau Server, even though you might not necessarily create that content. This role is also used in situations where governance is spread across a team rather than just through the creators in your organization. At the time of this recording, these are the main license types. They're bound to evolve and change over time so I'll add a link to a resource that explains all the current and any new licenses Tableau might add in the future. The final thing to cover here is that the mix of licenses you have in your organization will largely mirror the governance approach you choose for the platform and the size of your organization. We'll cover this later on when we talk about the Tableau Blueprint. Okay, let's change direction. At this point, it's worth highlighting that in 2019, Salesforce acquired Tableau and since then, the companies have been hard at work making their existing platforms work better together but also adding features in both platforms to enable a more unified experience of the Salesforce customer journey. As a result, the Tableau platform has grown to include aspects of Salesforce alongside other tools such as Mulesoft, to help you connect to more data sources and Slack to bring data and information to where you and your team's work. That transition is still ongoing and it will pick up pace in the coming years. This is probably a good point to highlight how frequently updates and features are deployed on the Tableau platform. You'll typically see Tableau referring to version numbers for its product release in the following format. The first part is just the year of the release and the second part is the number of the releases in that year. There are usually four releases a year in tune with quarters and each release usually introduces new features across the platform. The exception here is Tableau Server, which gets updates twice a year. That said, all products get security fixes immediately and patch fixes on an almost monthly schedule and that's what the last number refers to. For the last three years, I've covered most of the landmark new features right across the platform on my YouTube channel so be sure to follow me here on LinkedIn, so as soon as there's anything new on the platform, I'll update my feed with the latest content covering these features, giving you an easy way to stay in touch with what's new. Right, we know what Tableau is, we know how the licenses work and we know how often to expect new features. It's time to dive into the detail and get to know each of the products, features and tools that make this platform what it is. Let's hop in.