Welcome to the Essential Data Science Task Sheet Series. This series supplements the Iowa State University Geospatial Technology Training Program and is designed to provide quick, easy instructions for creating interactive data visualizations in either Tableau Public or Tableau Desktop.

Tableau’s products are software applications that allow users to create, visualize, and display data visualizations (or “vizzes”). Users can work with both tabular (.xls, .xlsx, .txt, .csv, .tab, .tsv, .json, .rdata) and geospatial (.shp, .gdb, .geojson, .topojson, .mif, and .kml) file formats and most Tableau programs can be used in-browser or can be downloaded onto Linux, Windows, or Mac operating systems. Tableau’s software offerings can be confusing. In this tutorial, you will learn about several popular Tableau products to help you choose which will be most helpful for your use cases.