By Bhupesh Upadhyay, Sanrachna Foundation

In the Big data world, getting information has become crucial. The massive amount of data is not beneficial until organizations get insights from it. Since the data is mounting at such a massive rate, the traditional ways of presenting data are less effective. Today, being able to represent the data in a way that is understandable for the user is something that is done in all sectors. Visualization plays a vital role in using big data to get a complete view and insight. Data visualization helps to tell stories by presenting data in an easy-to-understand way, highlighting trends and other essential properties. Good visualization tells a story, removes noise from data, and highlights useful details. Humans sometimes feel difficulty understanding a large amount of data or texts. When such large data and text are converted into a visual graphic, it becomes easy to understand the data.

Data visualization ranges from simple (line graphs, pie charts, scatter plots, and similar) to considerably more complex. Multiple data visualization tools are available in the market, but Tableau is considered the great master of data visualization. It is one of the best business intelligence and data visualization tool available today, and most Fortune Global 500 companies use this tool. The software has the advantage that it can be used with almost any database and is user friendly and helps in handling large volumes of data, along with offering faster dataset calculations. It is built for people with less technical skills or coding experience, so its user-friendly approach is its greatest strength. Tableau provides a very wide range of visualization options and helps in decision-making via forecasting, analytics, risk assessment, etc.

With Tableau, we can visualize a wide range of data types, including temporal, spatial, topical, and network data. The type of visualization available in Tableau include tables, bar charts, heat maps, treemaps, histograms, bubble charts, world maps, and more. It also provides an option to create custom visualization. Tableau also has the feature of a dashboard and story that are a way to present a variety of enhanced visualizations with annotations and filters and can be a way to present a quick overview of one’s data.

In dashboard different graphs are grouped so that one can have a overview of the information instead of going through each graph separately. On the other hand story allows Tableau users to create electronic presentations that allow readers to navigate through distinct views of the data presented in a more narrative format. We can also have motion graphs/ animation in Tableau. Putting data in motion has a major impact on data analysis, presentation, and storytelling. Animation can engage users in ways that other types of visualization cannot. The general purpose of animation in data visualization is to show the viewer how something changes from one position to another or from one period to another. Data visualization has thus become an integral part of data analytics and can include both static and interactive visualization approaches.

This article was originally published in Sanrachna.foundation. Read the article here.