Tableau

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Why Use Tableau?

Tableau is perhaps the most popular of the Georgetown-supported data visualization tools that can be used to graphically represent data for the purpose of visually communicating information about data to viewers. (To learn about more data visualization tools, see this guide from the Library.) Tableau provides opportunities for students to explore and understand data, examine the relationship between multiple data sets, and can foster a deeper understanding of data as it relates to course material.

What Can I Do With Tableau?

Tableau can be used in both teaching and learning for storytelling. The tool is easy to use and has a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface. Tableau creates fast and easy interactive visualizations that show trends in data. Tableau allows instructors to easily integrate data into their teaching and course assignments. Results can easily be shared with others in a way that is easy to understand.

Tableau is well suited for introductory courses to provide students with opportunities to work with data and construct graphs, charts, maps, and tables. For more advanced data manipulation or statistical analysis, there are other more powerful tools that faculty can use such as R or R Studio.

How Faculty Use Tableau

Business

Robin Dillon-Merrill, Professor in the McDonough School of Business, teaches students how to use Tableau to examine a company's corporate wellness program.

Get Started

  • Tableau Public is free, but users are not able to make their data private and must save their visualizations to the web application. To make data private, users should upgrade to Tableau Desktop. Students and faculty can request a one-year renewable license for Tableau Desktop directly from Tableau.
  • Tableau serves as one of several data visualization tools supported by the Library, including RawGraphs, Google Data Studio and Voyant. Due to its popularity, we’ve included it as our representative “Data Vis” tool on our site. The Library’s Data Visualization Research Guide has more tools and resources, and they host regular workshops on various data visualization topics and tools each Fall and Spring semester. For a one-on-one consultation on data visualization, email digitalscholarship@georgetown.edu.
  • To have R or R Studio installed on classroom computers, contact CETS. To learn more about the tool, visit the library spaces page where RStudio is available for student and faculty use.

For a consultation on how to use Tableau or other data visualization tools in your course design, please contact CNDLS.

Get Help

Contact CNDLS

See the Library's Data Visualization Research Guide

CNDLS