Introduction

Typically, the first step when analyzing data is to start with some questions or goals. It could be as simple as determining your most profitable customers, or more complicated, such as investigating which products are leading to losses despite high sales. After deciding on questions or goals, you would audit your data. This means identifying where data resides—whether the required fields are stored in a single or in multiple data sources and whether all fields are readily available for use. Then, you would check the integrity and validity of your data. This means checking whether the data needs any modifications in terms of cleaning, combining, or restructuring.

Once data is audited, the tools in Tableau Desktop allow you to explore it visually for more streamlined analysis. This can mean building charts, adding interactivity, separating data into groups, or creating calculations to derive more meaningful insights. Once analysis is complete, the insights you...