Learning Tableau: A Data Visualization Tool

Abstract

This article describes a tutorial for learning to use Tableau Public, which is free, powerful, and widely used software for data visualization. Data literacy is an important component of undergraduate research projects. This paper introduces an exercise that teaches the fundamental Tableau concepts and commands needed to create charts and graphs, assemble them, and tell a story of patterns observed in data. Our approach is to imbed the instructions and explanations within a Tableau file. In this way the student is reading directions and explanations, and dragging and dropping objects in the same file. From experience, we have found this to be a more intuitive way to learn than having the instructions in an external file, such as “.doc” or “.pdf”. To motivate the exercise, we chose the gender pay gap, and we use data from the Current Population Survey (CPS). The paper has a link to the question file and the answer file for the Tableau exercise.

Keywords: Data Literacy, Data Visualization, Economic Education

JEL Classification: A20, C00