Tableau Introduction

By the end of this lesson you will be able to explain what Tableau does, name its main products, and use the basic words (viz, worksheet, dashboard, story, workbook) correctly.

Imagine the owner of a small retail chain with shops in Jaipur, Lucknow and Pune. Every evening the billing software exports a long list of bills. Reading that list line by line tells her nothing. A bar chart of sales by city tells her in two seconds which shop is doing well. Tableau is a tool that builds such charts from data, quickly and without code.

What Tableau is

Tableau is a visual analytics tool. You connect it to data, such as an Excel file or a database. Then you drag column names onto a canvas, and Tableau draws a chart. You can then filter, sort, colour and combine charts into an interactive page for others.

Tableau has been part of Salesforce since 2019. This course was checked against Tableau Desktop 2026.3, released in October 2026, and the matching online help. Menu names rarely change between versions, so the steps also work on recent older versions.

How drag and drop becomes a question

When you drag "City" and "Sales" onto a sheet, you are really asking a question: "What is the total sales for each city?" Tableau translates your drag into a database query using its own technology, called VizQL (visual query language). It runs the query, gets a small result table, and draws one bar per row.

Think of a waiter in a restaurant. You point at pictures on the menu. The waiter writes the order in the kitchen's language and brings back the food. You never speak to the cook. In the same way, you never write the query; Tableau does.

If the data were in a database, the query Tableau sends would look roughly like this:

SELECT city, SUM(sales) AS sum_sales
FROM orders
GROUP BY city;

The result has one row per city. Tableau turns each row into one mark. A mark is a single drawn item: a bar, a point, a line segment or a map shape.

The words you will use every day

A workbook is saved as a .twb file (the workbook only, pointing to your data) or a .twbx file (a packaged workbook that also contains a copy of the data). You will learn when to use each in the publishing lesson.

The Tableau family of products

Tableau is not one program. These are the products you will hear about:

• Tableau Desktop: the Windows and macOS application where you build workbooks. It comes in different editions, explained in the next lesson.
• Tableau Public: a free website where anyone can publish workbooks for the world to see.
• Tableau Cloud: Tableau's hosted service for companies to share workbooks privately.
• Tableau Server: the same idea as Tableau Cloud, but installed on a company's own servers.
• Tableau Prep Builder: a separate tool for cleaning and reshaping data before analysis.

Newer AI features, such as Tableau Agent and Tableau Pulse, live mainly in Tableau Cloud. This course focuses on the core skills that every one of these products uses. If you have used Power BI, many ideas will feel familiar; the Power BI course and the comparison lesson show how the two tools approach the same jobs.

What a first analysis looks like

Here is the full journey you will follow in the next few lessons.

Step 1: Connect to a file of sales data. You see the Data Source page with a preview of the rows.

Step 2: Open a new worksheet. You see the field names listed on the left.

Step 3: Drag City to Rows and Sales to Columns. You see one horizontal bar per city.

Step 4: Sort the bars from largest to smallest. You see the best city at the top.

You can check any bar by hand. For example, if Jaipur had two bills of ₹378 and ₹630, its bar should show this total:

=378+630

1008

Checking a number or two by hand is a habit of good analysts. It catches wrong data before your manager does.

Common mistakes

• Thinking a chart is the goal. The goal is an answer to a business question. Decide the question first, then the chart.
• Mixing up worksheet and dashboard. A worksheet holds one viz. A dashboard arranges several worksheets.
• Emailing a .twb file. The receiver cannot open the data. Send a .twbx packaged workbook or publish it instead.

Key points

• Tableau connects to data and turns drag-and-drop actions into charts without code.
• VizQL translates each drag into a query; each row of the result becomes a mark.
• A workbook holds data sources, worksheets, dashboards and stories.
• .twb stores only the workbook; .twbx also packages the data.
• Tableau Desktop builds; Tableau Public, Cloud and Server share; Prep Builder cleans data.

SELECT brand, SUM(sales) FROM bills GROUP BY brand;