Tableau is the leading visual analytics platform, enabling users to connect to virtually any data source and build interactive dashboards and reports without writing code. It spans a product family — Tableau Desktop, Tableau Cloud, Tableau Server, Tableau Prep, and Tableau Pulse — covering everything from self-service analytics to enterprise-scale data pipelines and proactive AI-driven metrics. The core mental model is the VizQL engine: when you drag fields onto the canvas, Tableau translates your actions into a structured query language that fetches and renders data live or from extracted caches. Since Tableau 2025.1, Tableau Agent (generative AI) is built into Desktop and Cloud, enabling natural-language chart building, calculated field authoring, and AI-generated dashboard narratives.
What This Cheat Sheet Covers
This topic spans 27 focused tables and 253 indexed concepts. Below is a complete table-by-table outline of this topic, spanning foundational concepts through advanced details.
Table 1: Chart Types
Tableau's Show Me menu hides most of these behind a single click, but knowing which fields each chart wants on Columns, Rows, and the mark shelves is what makes you fast. From the everyday bar and line up to Gantt, waterfall, and dual-axis combinations, this is the visual vocabulary you will assemble dashboards from.
| Type | Example | Description |
|---|---|---|
Drag Category to Columns, Sales to Rows | • Most versatile chart for comparing discrete categories • horizontal bars work best with long labels. | |
Drag Order Date to Columns, Sales to Rows | • Best for showing trends over time • connect marks to show continuity. | |
Sales on Columns, Profit on Rows, Customer on Detail | Reveals correlations and outliers between two measures. | |
Drag Country or Lat/Lon fields to canvas | • Auto-geocodes geographic fields • supports filled maps, point maps, and density maps. | |
Two dimensions on rows/columns, measure on Color | Shows magnitude at intersections of two categorical dimensions using color intensity. | |
One+ dimensions on Color/Label, measure on Size | Displays part-to-whole hierarchies as nested rectangles sized by measure. | |
Change mark type to Pie; dimension on Color, measure on Angle | • Best for 5 or fewer slices • use bar charts for more categories. | |
Show Me → Box-and-Whisker Plot | Visualizes distribution, median, quartiles, and outliers in one mark. |