I really enjoy combining science and graphic design

And Tableau makes this pretty darn easy. Haven’t heard of it? I’m not surprised… it seems to have skipped right over the science world and has comfortably settled into the business world. Perhaps there’s room for a comeback?

Tableau allows you to upload your spreadsheets, use drag and drop tools to create visualizations, and then share them with a click. Okay, okay, admittedly that’s their tagline, but it’s almost that good. To me, it’s Excel crossed with Powerpoint with a dash of the useful parts of Clippy from Microsoft Word 97.

C’mon, you remember Clippy, right?

Okay, you don’t get Clippy, but Tableau does help you by telling you what data you need to create the visualization you’re looking to create. Don’t have anything in mind? Drag and drop your data and it’ll provide you data visualization suggestions.

Anyway, it’s a pretty neat tool with some nice features including:

• Amazing visualization capabilities
• Fairly easy to use
• Several databases pre-loaded (like census data)
• Dashboards are mobile-friendly
• Easy to share and embed

Unfortunately, there are also some major cons, including:

• Easy to inadvertantly have version control issues
• Very expensive for non-students*
• Poor support
• Learning curve for most

_{Fortunately, as a student, I don’t have to pay for Tableau (yet), so that con doesn’t apply to me.}

The largest concern for scientists, of course, would be version control issues. I encountered this myself before I understood how to use the software. The easy work around is to export your filtered spreadsheets, save your tableau workbook locally (with date), and to not use the online Tableau editing tool. Follow those guidelines, and that shouldn’t be a problem.

Of course, R is the current gold standard in reproducibility since your colleague can just copy your code, run it, and see the same results (assuming you write in version control for your dependencies). I’m not favoring Tableau over R for these reasons; however, it is much less time consuming to create a truly stunning dashboard in Tableau than it is in R.

So, my take away: Tableau is great for students (or profs with deeeeeep pockets) who need to quickly produce beautiful data visualizations. I think Tableau has great potential, especially for multimedia extension or science outreach. Want to see what I mean? Check out the examples below.

Stunning Tableau Examples

Swainson’s hawk migration by Jonni Walker

A beautiful infographic on the Swainson’s Hawk’s migratory journey. Click the bars to open up a mini-map of the journey during each month. Note: you may have to scroll to the side to see the entire infographic. Full size here.

Money and happiness by Judit Bekker

Be sure to click the menu to pull down the legend. This data scientist has produced some incredible visualizations. Check others out here. Full size here.

Fast food chains by Naresh Suglani

Hover over the logos and graph for more information. Also, I love the on-point theme. Full size here.

Thoughts on Tableau?

I’d love to see what you create and hear how you felt about using Tableau. Shoot me an email or send me a tweet with your visualization. Note: I am not affiliated with Tableau and this is not a paid endorsement.