Tableau

The American Time Usage Survey is a big data collection effort from the U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS (BLS).

The survey collects detailed time usage data (how people spend their time) for a sampling of people across the US.

They provide the data files in a very detailed form: data files page. You can get lots of information about who the people are and what they did.

One thing that makes this data interesting is that it is done with a great deal of statistical care to document each thing very carefully so that it can be used correctly.

Invitations to our Tableau Cloud instance were sent out after class today.

You should receive an email with subject “You’ve Been Invited to Tableau Cloud” from the server (reghelp@onlinemail.tableau.com). Please accept the invitation and set up your account now. Even though we may not use Tableau until next week.

This is a tutorial on how to get started with Tableau using the Census Data for the Design Exercises. It will walk you through what I did to make a few initial pictures. This will show you some of the quirks of Tableau, and the dataset.

Tableau is a commercial data analysis and visualization tool. The company generously provides it for use in classes through the Tableau for Teaching Program.

Here, we will give you a brief guide on how to get started with it, and pointers to some resources. We expect students to figure out how to work with Tableau enough for class.