Course Introduction

Quick reference

• 00:04 All right, welcome to the course.
• 00:05 My name is John Elder and I'll be your instructor today.
• 00:07 In this video, I want to spend just a couple of minutes talking about what you
• 00:10 can expect from the course,
• 00:12 laying out the different things we're going to be looking at.
• 00:14 And generally just sort of introducing myself and saying hello.
• 00:17 So I'm very excited about this course, this is going to be a lot of fun.
• 00:20 So Tableau is a fantastic data visualization tool, and
• 00:24 it is drop-dead simple.
• 00:26 And I say drop-dead because most of the things we're going to do is drag and drop.
• 00:30 We're just going to move our cursor around, drag some things,
• 00:33 drop some things, and create very cool visualizations in, really, just seconds.
• 00:38 So you don't need to know any computer programming to take this course.
• 00:40 You don't really need to know any data analysis techniques.
• 00:44 You don't need to know statistics or anything like that.
• 00:46 We're going to start at the very beginning and
• 00:48 very quickly create some professional looking visualizations.
• 00:51 So in this course, we're going to be working with dog registration data.
• 00:55 So we're going to take some public data from a government agency,
• 00:58 import it into Tableau, and then start to analyze it.
• 01:01 We're going to create some graphs and charts, bar charts, pie charts,
• 01:04 line charts.
• 01:05 In fact, if we come up here, we can look, all the different charts that we're
• 01:08 going to be looking at throughout this course, very cool.
• 01:10 And we could just kind of scroll through here and see some of these things.
• 01:14 We can click on different things and they move around.
• 01:18 You can see there's animation and it looks pretty cool.
• 01:21 We can do pie charts,
• 01:22 we've got blocks of data that we can represent visually like this.
• 01:26 We're also going to create dashboards.
• 01:28 So we could take a bunch of visualizations that we create and
• 01:30 make them into a nice little dashboard.
• 01:32 We can add images, logos, text, all kinds of different things.
• 01:36 And these are also going to be interactive, so we can click on these
• 01:39 things and the charts and graphs move around even in the dashboards, very cool.
• 01:43 And finally, at the end of the course, we're going to create stories,
• 01:47 which are sort of like PowerPoint presentations.
• 01:49 And we can cycle through the different, think of them as slides,
• 01:53 show different data.
• 01:55 Again, still interactive and very cool.
• 01:58 So I think you're going to be surprised just how quick and
• 02:01 easy it is to get up and running with Tableau.
• 02:03 There's really not a very steep learning curve,
• 02:06 this is very sort of intuitive after you figure out how this all works.
• 02:10 It looks overwhelming at first, there's all these different things all
• 02:13 over the screen, and it can be overwhelming.
• 02:15 But we're going to break it down.
• 02:16 We're going to start right off the bat by explaining what all of these different
• 02:19 areas are.
• 02:20 It looks like a lot, but
• 02:21 it's really pretty simple once we break them down individually.
• 02:24 That's what we're going to start doing.
• 02:25 I'll show you how to find data, how to import it, how to get going.
• 02:29 And it should be a lot of fun.
• 02:30 So in the next video, we're going to dive right in and download and install Tableau.

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