Tableau activity

Data visualisation with Tableau

Tableau is a powerful and flexible data visualisation tool.

Before you start

Before doing this activity you will need to install Tableau onto your computer. Tableau Public is already installed on the student-use computers at Griffith. If you are using your own computer, follow the instructions below to install Tableau.

Connect your data sources
  1. Download the sample data: Queensland Hospital Procedures 2018
  2. Launch Tableau
  3. Click ‘Connect to data source’
  4. Select the sample data from your Downloads folder
  5. Click OK

The data should appear in columns on the bottom half of your screen.

Prepare your data for use

You will see that Tableau attempts to detect what kind of value is in each column and assigns a value type accordingly. Tableau doesn’t get all of these guesses correct, so we have to correct some of them.

Connect your data sources
  1. Click on the ‘Abc’ at the top of the ‘Percent on time’ column
  2. Select ‘Number (decimal)’ from the list
  3. Do the same with ‘YoY Variation’, ‘Percent ready within time’
  4. Click on the ‘Abc’ at the top of ‘Date updated’
  5. Select ‘Date and time’ from the list

The data should appear in columns on the bottom half of your screen.

Now watch the video below which will take you through the next few stages of the activity.

Stepping through the Tableau activity

Make your first chart

Click on ‘Sheet 1’ at the bottom of the window. You will see that your columns have been placed in two categories, dimensions and measures.

Make a simple bar chart
  1. Drag the dimension Hospital name to the Rows field at the top of the Worksheet
  2. Drag Number treated from the Measures list to the Columns field at the top of the worksheet.

Add filters

There is an entry called Queensland Reporting Hospitals which records the sum of all the other entries. This is distorting the chart so we need to remove it.

Add a filter to your data
  1. Drag Hospital name from the Dimensions List to the Filters box
  2. Scroll down and uncheck the box next to Queensland Reporting Hospitals
  3. Click OK

There’s one more filter we need to add. In the ‘Urgency’ field, there is also a summary row that is distorting the data. So let’s do it again for Urgency.

Filter urgency results
  1. Drag Urgency from the Dimensions List to the Filters box
  2. Scroll down and uncheck the box next to ALL. Make sure the others are checked.
  3. Click OK

Sort and colour

It’s time to make it look a bit nicer.

Sort and colour
  1. Click the Sort descending button on the toolbar.
  2. Drag Number treated from the Measures list to the Color box under the heading ‘Marks’
  3. Click the Color button
  4. Click Edit colors
  5. Select a palette from the Palette drop-down. I chose ‘Red-Green Diverging’