Tableau is Child's Play

An example of how simple tableau is to use and pick up with minimal training or technical know-how.

My 7 year old daughter came home from school the other day with some homework (or "home learning" as it is now called).  Her class topic this term is "Weather" and this particular "home learning" was to watch and note down the weather forecast for 10 days, with this she had to produce a presentation (they suggested PowerPoint) to show her IT skills (this is the first time IT skills have been part of homework, but I expect that to change from now on).  My wife was not best pleased about this as when children are in year 3 "home learning" usually means "parent learning", but she had already logged on to the BBC weather website and printed off the first day's forecast and was expecting to have to do the same thing for ten days and the work out how to connect these all together as a presentation.

This got me thinking, surely someone out there is already recording the weather data (in fact I knew the local grammar school has a weather station in its grounds) so I quickly looked up on the web if the data was available, and bingo! you could down load the weather data going back years, taken every few minutes as a CSV file.

So on Saturday morning I sat down with my daughter at the computer, she "drove" with me directing her.  Now up until now she had only used the computer to play online kids games like spongebob etc.  She already understood the concept of Internet browsing so getting her to the weather data page and downloading the CSV files for the right days was straight forward.

At home I have tableau public (as it's free!) so only connects to CSV, excel etc.. no databases, but this is good enough for what I wanted it for. Next came the moment of truth, could she use Tableau?.   The answer was a simple, yes! with Tableau's "drag and drop" approach within an hour she had downloaded the CSV files,  connected to the data, created three charts (including creating her own wind direction Shapes) arranged them in a dash board with a few pictures to illustrate and published to the Internet. Easy!

A couple of days later I found out that her Viz had been make "Viz of the Day" by Tableau Public.

A couple of months later I went to the Tableau on Tour Conference in London at the Brewery.  The first Tableau Public Viz up on the big screen during the Opening Keynote from James Eiloart.