Learning Tableau 2019: Tools for Business Intelligence, data prep, and visual analytics, Third Edition

Good Tableau work starts before the chart: it begins with understanding the data, choosing a useful view, and knowing what question that view should help answer. In Learning Tableau 2019, Joshua N. Milligan builds those skills step by step, from first connections and visualizations to calculations, dashboards, and data preparation.

This third edition moves between explanation and practical examples, giving readers a path through Tableau’s core concepts and more advanced analytical techniques. It is designed for newcomers and for users who want to deepen their Tableau practice.

Start with the data, then shape the view

The early chapters introduce Tableau’s interface and foundational ideas, including measures and dimensions, discrete and continuous fields, and connections to files, servers, and cloud sources. Readers explore data extracts, joins, blends, and filtering alongside visual forms such as bar and line charts, maps, treemaps, scatterplots, and distributions. The emphasis is on understanding how data choices affect the visualization—not just selecting a chart type.

Go further with calculations and analysis

As the material advances, it takes up row-level and aggregate calculations, parameters, level-of-detail expressions, and table calculations. These topics help explain how to work with data at different levels and build analyses that respond to changing questions. Further chapters explore trends, clustering, forecasting, and distributions.

Make dashboards tell a clearer story

Dashboard design receives dedicated attention, including layout choices, actions, filtering, and adapting views for different displays. The book also examines tooltips and formatting, showing how presentation decisions can add context and make an analytical view easier to interpret.

Bring data preparation into the workflow

Beyond visualization, the book covers cleaning and structuring data, introduces Tableau Prep, and discusses sharing data stories with others. This broader scope connects the preparation of information to its analysis and communication.

Who may find it useful?

Readers new to Tableau can follow a structured route from fundamentals to more complex techniques. Existing users may find the later material on calculations, dashboards, and data preparation useful for extending their analytical toolkit. The publisher notes that database experience can help, but is not necessary.

Explore Tableau as a connected practice: prepare the data, investigate it thoughtfully, and build views that make the findings easier to see.