What you need for this book

You will need to install Tableau Desktop V10 to follow the recipes in this book. Tableau Desktop can be downloaded from www.tableau.com. The trial version of Tableau offers a fully functional version for 14 days.

If you are an educator or student using Tableau for your course, please check out Tableau for Teaching (TFT). You can find more information at http://www.tableau.com/academic/teaching. This is a great program for educators who want to integrate visual analytics in their courses.

If you are a journalist, Tableau Desktop is available free for you at https://public.tableau.com/en-us/s/blog/2013/06/journalists-now-tableau-desktop-free-you.

You can also use Tableau Public, a free version of the software, to complete many of the recipes. Tableau Public has some limitations, however, which may prevent you from following some of the steps. You can find the comparison and limitations of the different Tableau Desktop versions at https://public.tableau.com/en-us/s/download.

While this book covers Tableau V10, many of the concepts and steps still apply to other versions, barring some minor changes in steps or interface.