To get started, enter your user name and password to sign in to your Tableau site. Then, from the navigation pane, click Explore to see all the content you have access to across the site.

Initially, you will see Top-Level Projects. You can browse these projects or select other content types.

In some way, you'll need to connect to data in order to analyze it and build a workbook.

To begin, click the New button and select Workbook.

The Connect to Data window appears to choose a data source.

You've connected to data, and now you're ready to create a visual analysis of your data. Tableau calls this a view.

Workspace area

This is the layout of the Tableau workspace:

1. Workbook name. A workbook contains sheets. A sheet can be a worksheet, a dashboard, or a story. For more information, see Workbooks and Sheets.
2. Pages shelf, Filters shelf, Marks card- Drag fields to the cards and shelves in the workspace to add data to your view. For more information, see Shelves and Cards.
3. Columns and Rows shelf- Drag fields to the cards and shelves in the workspace to add data to your view. For more information, see Shelves and Cards.
4. Toolbar- Use the toolbar to access commands and analysis and navigation tools. See the Tableau Toolbar Button reference.
5. View- This is the workspace where you create your data visualizations.
6. Side Bar- In a worksheet, the side bar area contains the Data pane and the Analytics pane.
7. Sheet tabs- Tabs represent each sheet in your workbook. This can include worksheets, dashboards, and stories.

Every time you drag a field into the view or onto a shelf, you are asking a question about that data. The question will vary depending on where you drag various fields, the types of fields, and the order in which you drag fields into the view.

For every question you ask, the view changes to represent the answer visually - with marks (shapes, text, hierarchies, table structures, axes, color).

In the worksheet, the columns from your data source are shown as fields on the left side in the Data pane. The Data pane contains a variety of different kinds of fields, organized by table.

When you build a view, you add fields from the Data pane. You can do this in different ways. For example:

• Drag fields from the Data pane and drop them onto the cards and shelves that are part of every Tableau worksheet.

Double-click one or more fields in the Data pane.

You might want to filter your data to only display a certain amount in your view. You can filter your data in a number of ways, including:

When you add fields to the filter Shelf, an interactive filter appears in the view. You can then select the items you want to include or exclude in the view.

• To create a filter in Tableau on the web, drag a dimension, measure, or date field to the filter shelf.
• When you add a field to the filters shelf, an interactive filter appears in the view. You can select items you want to include or exclude from the view, or select a range of values.

You can also interact with a published view by selecting a single mark (data point) or click and drag in the view to select several marks. On the tooltip that appears, you can select Keep Only to keep only the selected marks in the view, or select Exclude to remove the selected marks from the view.

You can use the Marks card to add context and details to the marks in your view. You use the Marks card to set the mark type, and to encode your data with color, size, shape, detail, and text.

Tableau is extremely flexible and very forgiving. As you build a view, if you ever take a path that isn't answering your question, you can always undo to a previous point in your exploration.

• To undo or redo, click undo or redo on the toolbar.

You can undo all the way back to the last time you opened the workbook. You can undo or redo an unlimited number of times.