Introduction to Tableau

 What is Business Intelligence?

Companies use business intelligence technologies to collect, analyze and present data to create actionable information. Today’s businesses are always seeking insights about their customers, products, and services. So companies are faced with many questions such as, "What would make my customers stay?" or "How do I know that my customers are happy and are not planning to switch?", etc. Business Intelligence helps you to answer those questions when you have a problem about what are your customers feeling? Or what your customers are doing?  Who are the customers?  Or what are the best channels to target them? Business Intelligence is a method to transform your data into these insights and measurable matrix. Various business Intelligence tools are designed to make the data flow manageable, allowing organizations to turn structured and unstructured data into something actionable and insightful for their business. The standard tools include MicroStrategy, Oracle, SAP, SAS, etc, In the age of information, tableau is one of the many tools to help and manage the data flow and turn data into actionable information.

What is Tableau?

Tableau is a Business Intelligence tool for virtually evaluating the data. With the help of this technology, the users can create and allocate an interactive and shareable dashboard, which represents the developments, variations, and the bulk of the data in the form of graphs, charts, and maps. Tableau can even connect to Big Data sources or other relational technologies to acquire and process data. Tableau is unique software as it permits data blending and real-time collaboration. It is primarily used by academic researchers, businesses scientists, and many government organizations for visual data analysis.

What makes Tableau different?

Tableau technology is designed for everyone. Any individual can access it to become an analytics expert. It is a straightforward technology, as in this, no scripting is required. Unlike others, in the tableau, there is no need for learning any programming language. Any individual can grow his deployment, and for that all he needs is some data and tableau software to create reports that are visually enchanting and which conveys a story which they need to tell their managers or can impress their colleagues during a meeting. With its revolutionary drag and drop feature, one can easily create accounts or reports using just their mouse and a little imagination and creativity. All this is possible due to the revolutionary VizQL commonly known as the visual query language.

History of Tableau

  • Tableau Software was produced by an American computer software company which is headquartered in Seattle, WA, USA. This company has produced many interactive data visualization products which had focused only on business intelligence.
  • The tableau software was founded at the Stanford University by the Department of Computer Science between 1997 and 2002. Specialized in visualization techniques, Professor Pat Hanrahan and Ph.D. student Chris Stolte had explored and analyzed the relational databases and data cubes. They had researched the use of table-based displays to study multidimensional relational databases.
  • Both of them developed a structured query language for databases with a vivid style for executing graphics and proposed a database for the visualization of a language called VizQL which stand for ‘Visual Query Language’. VizQL shaped the core of the Polaris system, an interface for exploring large multi-dimensional databases.
  • In 2003, they recruited their former business partner and friend, Christian Chabot to serve as the CEO of Tableau. It was turned out of Stanford with an eponymous software application. The application queries relational cubes, databases, cloud database, and spreadsheets. After that, it produces many graph types that can be combined into dashboards and can be shared over the internet or computer network.
  • In 2010, Tableau experienced revenue of around 34.2 million dollars. The number grew to $62.4 million in the year 2011 and $127.7 million in 2012. High profits came during the same periods which were around $2.7 million to $3.4 million, respectively. Shares of Tableau Software started trading on the New York Stock Exchange after an initial public offering on May 17, 2013.