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 β Tableau Desktop, Tableau Cloud, Tableau Server, Tableau Prep, and Tableau Pulse β 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
| Type | Example | Description |
|---|---|---|
Drag Category to Columns, Sales to Rows | β’ Most versatile chart for comparing discrete categories β’ horizontal bars work best with long labels. | |
Drag Order Date to Columns, Sales to Rows | β’ Best for showing trends over time β’ 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 | β’ Auto-geocodes geographic fields β’ 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 | β’ Best for 5 or fewer slices β’ use bar charts for more categories. | |
Show Me β Box-and-Whisker Plot | Visualizes distribution, median, quartiles, and outliers in one mark. |