Tableau is one of the fastest-evolving business intelligence (BI) and data visualization tools at the moment. The user-friendly interface, combined with powerful capabilities, makes it one of the most widely used and popular BI tools around the globe. Tableau offers many functionalities, and getting started with the basic ones is surprisingly easy. This chapter will get you familiar with Tableau basics and, by the end of it, you will have learned how to connect to a data source, and how to make simple visualizations.
To complete the recipes in this chapter, we will be using data on baby names in the US, which have been collected by the US Federal Social Security Administration (SSA). The Baby_names.csv dataset contains the most popular baby names (that have 100 or more registered appearances) in the US, from 2010 through 2017. The dataset contains information about the state, gender of the name, name itself, year, and number of babies with said name.