Tableau is a business intelligence software that visually represents data from

varied sources to create interactive and shareable dashboards.

What are the advantages of Tableau?
Some of the advantages of using Tableau:
• Data visualization: Rather than having complex computations over an Excel sheet,
Tableau provides beautiful insights, data blending, and dashboarding derived from
the data.
• Create interactive visualizations: Tableau provides a drag-n-drop facility to
quickly let the users interact with the data. You can check some of the templates
created using Tableau in the Tableau gallery. With Tableau’s gallery of templates,
you can choose your option and customize it. With data visualization features, you
can easily embed tons of information in the form of infographics that appeal to the
audience.
• Ease of implementation: With drag-and-drop options, Tableau is reportedly easier
to use. This is one such tool that you can learn without having any coding
background or experience in Python, Business objects, or DOMO.
• Handle large amounts of data: Tableau is competent enough to handle millions of
rows without affecting the dashboard performance.
• Integration of scripting languages: With Tableau, you can perform complex data
computations using scripting languages like Python and R by importing some visuals
or packages.

What are different Tableau products?

Tableau like other BI tools has a range of products:
• Tableau Desktop: Desktop product is used to create optimized queries out from
pictures of data. Once the queries are ready, you can perform those queries without
the need to code. Tableau desktop encompasses data from various sources into its
data engine and creates an interactive dashboard.
• Tableau Server: When you have published dashboards using Tableau Desktop, Tableau
servers help in sharing them throughout the organization. It is an enterprise-level
feature that is installed on a Windows or Linux server.
• Tableau Reader: Tableau Reader is a free feature available on Desktop that lets
you open and views data visualizations. You can filter or drill down the data but
restricts editing any formulas or performing any kind of actions on it. It is also
used to extract connection files.
• Tableau Online: Tableau online is also a paid feature but doesn’t need exclusive
installation. It comes with the software and is used to share the published
dashboards anywhere and everywhere.
• Tableau Public: Tableau public is yet another free feature to view your data
visualizations by saving them as worksheets or workbooks on Tableau Server.

measures and dimensions?

In Tableau, when we connect to a new data source, each field in the data source is
either mapped as measures or dimensions. These fields are the columns defined in
the data source. Each field is assigned a dataType (integer, string, etc.) and a
role (discrete dimension or continuous measure).
Measures contain numeric values that are analyzed by a dimension table. Measures
are stored in a table that allows storage of multiple records and contains foreign
keys referring uniquely to the associated dimension tables.
While Dimensions contain qualitative values (name, dates, geographical data) to
define comprehensive attributes to categorize, segment, and reveal the data
details.

What are continuous and discrete field types?

Tableau’s specialty lies in displaying data differently either in continuous format
or discrete. Both of them are mathematical terms used to define data where
continuous means without interruptions and discrete means are individually separate
and distinct.
While the blue color indicates discrete behavior, the green color indicates
continuous behavior. On one hand, the discrete view defines the headers and can be
easily sorted, while continuous defines the axis in a graph view and cannot be
sorted.

Tell me the different connections to make with a dataset?

There are two types of data connections in Tableau:
LIVE: Live connection is a dynamic way to extract real-time data by directly
connecting to the data source. Tableau directly creates queries against the
database entries and retrieves the query results in a workbook.
EXTRACT: A snapshot of the data, extract the file (.tde or .hyper file) contains
data from a relational database. The data is extracted from a static source of data
like an Excel Spreadsheet. You can schedule to refresh the snapshots which are done
using the Tableau server. This doesn’t need any connection with the database.

What are the supported file extensions in Tableau?

The supported file extensions used in Tableau Desktop are:
• Tableau Workbook (TWB): contains all worksheets, story points, dashboards, etc.
• Tableau Data Source (TDS): contains connection information and metadata about
your data source
• Tableau Data Extract (TDE): contains data that has been extracted from other data
sources.
• Tableau Packaged Workbook (TWBX): contains a combination of the workbook,
connection data, and metadata, and the data itself in the form of TDE. It can be
zipped and shared.
• Tableau Packaged Data Source (TDSX): contains a combination of different files.
• Tableau Bookmark (TBM): to earmark a specific worksheet.

Data blending in Tableau?

Data blending is viewing and analyzing data from multiple sources in one place.
Primary and secondary are two types of data sources that are involved in data
blending.

How do you generally perform load testing in Tableau?

Load testing in Tableau is done to understand the server’s capacity with respect to
its environment, data, workload, and use. It is preferable to conduct load testing
at least 3-4 times in a year because with every new user, upgrade, or content
authoring, the usage, data, and workload change.
Tabjolt was created by Tableau to conduct point-and-run load and performance
testing specifically for Tableau servers. Tabjolt:
• Automates the process of user-specified loads
• Eliminates dependency on script development or script maintenance
• Scales linearly with an increase in the load by adding more nodes to the cluster

What are the various types of filters in Tableau?

Tableau has 6 different types of filters:
• Extract Filter: This filter retrieves a subset of data from the data source.
• Dimension Filter: This filter is for non-aggregated data (discrete).
• Data Source Filter: This filter refrains users from viewing sensitive information
and thus reduces data feeds.
• Context Filter: This filter creates datasets by applying presets in Tableau.
• Measure Filter: This filter applies various operations like sum, median, avg,
etc.
• Table Calculation Filter: This filter is applied after the view has been created.

What are dual axes?

Dual axes are used to analyze two different measures at two different scales in the
same graph. This lets you compare multiple attributes on one graph with two
independent axes layered one above the other.
What is the Rank Function in Tableau?
Rank function is used to give positions (rank) to any measure in the data set.
Tableau can rank measure in the following ways:
• Rank: The rank function in Tableau accepts two arguments: aggregated measure and
ranking order (optional) with a default value of desc.
• Rank_dense: The rank_dense also accepts the two arguments: aggregated measure and
ranking order. This assigns the same rank to the same values but doesn’t stop there
and keeps incrementing with the other values. For instance, if you have values 10,
20, 20, 30, then ranks will be 1, 2, 2, 3.
• Rank_modified: The rank_modified assigns the same rank to similar values.
• Rank_unique: The rank_unique assigns a unique rank to each and every value. For
example, If the values are 10, 20, 20, 30 then the assigned ranks will be 1,2,3,4
respectively.