Tool Review: Tableau

Tableau was founded in 2003, and has about 300,000 active users. It boasts partnerships with over 1,200 companies, and can be used to create a wide variety of data visualizations, including ranging from standard charts and maps to more complex and unique creations. Tableau also has a pretty extensive tech support, with nearly 500 instructional videos, a help section for frequently asked questions and user forums for people to post unsolved questions. The website has an active blog that highlights creations from Tableau Public users.

​

For this project, I compiled a dataset of Boston Public School student and teacher diversity using Massachusetts’ School and District Profiles website. I was able to create a map of all the public high schools, and to create a gradient to color the points according to how many white students were enrolled. As you can tell from the map, white students are vastly overrepresented at high-performing exam schools. If you click on an individual school, two stacked bar charts below the map will highlight the racial breakdown of the students at that school, as well as that of the teachers. Users can also click and drag to select multiple schools at once, allowing them to compare and contrast the demographics.

​

As a data journalism tool, I think Tableau has many strengths. It appears to be a very versatile platform, with something to offer to users of every skill level. Beginners can use the free version of the site either online or through a desktop app. Users can also upgrade to a paid version to access more datasets, custom geocodes, and mobile formats.

 

Though some of the more advanced techniques do require an in-depth knowledge of Tableau’s user interface, there is plenty that users can do at any skill level. The design itself is also extremely flexible, allowing users to create a wide array of charts, maps, and other forms of data visualization by dragging and clicking on different parts of the dataset. They can also use the filter function to highlight different parts of a data visualization and make different charts and maps interact with each other.

 

Although this site had many positive attributes, it did have some weaknesses. To start, uploading a dataset was much more difficult than it has been on other data viz platforms that I have used. While using the web browser version, I was unable to properly save my dataset, which meant that I couldn’t save any of the work I had been doing, and was forced to start again from scratch more than once.