Data Visualisation Tools: Tableau Public

It rained the whole day yesterday, so I decided to explore different data visualisation tools. One tool I looked at was Tableau Public from Tableau. It is a free data visualisation software that you can download from Tableau’s website.

It was easy to download and install the app. Among the tool’s resources you can find a number of sample data sets to play around with. For my first visualisation I used one of these sample data sets with statistics for Eurovision song contest entries between 1998 and 2012. The result is the following packed bubbles graph:

This graph shows an average song quality score for the countries that reached a Eurovision song contest final in any year. The bubble size reflects the sum of points that a particular country received during the years. This visualisation is interactive: just hover over any of the circles to see the statistics for a specific country.

Note: there is no possibility to save your workbooks locally to your computer in Tableau Public. You can store your visualisations only in your public profile, which means that anyone can find and see your visualisations online. So I would not use this tool to visualise confidential data.

Tableau Public worked easily with Excel and text (.csv) files containing the sample data. I have not yet tried importing an own dataset, so it is something to test next 🙂 .

If you need some inspiration, you can browse through the gallery or look at the visualisations from the featured authors. For example, I found a chart showing which Game of Thrones characters appeared most frequently over the last 5 seasons:

Another visualisation shows an analysis of the Beatles as a group (click on the picture to get to the visualisation):

I thought that Tableau Public is a great option for quick visualisations if your data can be shared. I will continue using the free version to test the functionality with the help of publicly available data.

Have you ever used Tableau Public for data visualisation? What did you think of it?