Starting a Visualization Project

Before embarking on any visualization project, you should always consider your audience and purpose for your visualization (Stage 1) (see our Data Visualization Guide Design Workflow section for more details). For the purposes of this tutorial, the audience is for your eyes only and the purpose is to learn how to visualize data in Tableau Desktop.

Next, you need to select your data and gain an understanding of it (Stage 2). For this tutorial, we started by using a Google Sheet document that was being continuously cleaned and updated by Tableau daily (see this page for details). This was not necessarily the most authoritative or up-to-date data source to use for this topic; see our resources pages for other sources out there. It was selected as a good source to demonstrate linking to real time data in Tableau.

Note: The dashboard and dataset are constantly changing. Unfortunately, these instructions no longer work with the current google sheet, so instead download this snapshot of the data (from April 7, 2020) to use with the tutorial instead. In Tableau’s Connect screen, connect to an Excel file instead and browse to this snapshot file, then skip to step 2 to continue the tutorial. We leave the old instructions up for your reference on how you would connect to a google sheet datasource. More details about this dataset and how it has changed since this tutorial was created can be found on this Tableau page.

Technique: Data Visualization | Tools: Tableau