Tableau Public is free software that can help users publish interactive data visualizations to the internet. This software is another great option for data visualization along with GIS Cloud or CartoDB. It has powerful charting and graphing tools, and also allows you to map data and display that data against several online datasets and basemaps.No plug-ins or programming skills are required, just a browser with JavaScript enabled. Tableau Public uses a simple drag and drop process that anyone can learn. You can work with either the free Tableau Desktop app, or Tableau Online the free cloud based server. Either way you can save your work to the Tableau Public Web servers, which are accessible by everyone on the Internet. One important note about this is that any data you publish is accessible to everyone on the internet.People see and understand data, reports and dashboards faster with visual analytics technology, which can help uncover key trends, relationships, patterns, and outliers that might otherwise be a challenge to find. Tableau Public can be used to pare down information to its simplest form by stripping away the less important data.The software can connect to Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, and multiple text file formats. It has a limit of 1,000,000 rows of data allowed in any single file. Your organization may use up to 50 megabytes of space.Tableau Public projects can be shared by emailing a link or by embedding the work in a blog, wiki, or website. Clicking on an emailed link will open a browser page with the view loaded. If embedded onto a page, anyone who visits the page will see the live interactive view. The following shows the use of Tableau Public in two health related studies.Public Health Case StudiesTo visualize the specific social problem of teen pregnancy over time, Tableau Public was used by the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families to show the decline in births to teen mothers in Wisconsin over recent years. The data depicts racial disparities in teen births in Wisconsin as well as differences in birth rates between older and younger teens. The online link to the data visualizations created with Tableau Public for this study can be found here: http://tblsft.com/public/gallery/teen-pregnancy-declinesThe figure below is a screenshot of one of the data visualizations from this study. Data visualizations are interactive. Here the white popup window is showing data from a specific place on the line graph.
Such visualizations may help communities address and manage such issues as health problems associated with prematurity and poor academic performance of children of teen parents.Data can also be mapped by geographic coordinates, city, state, county, and zip code. The visualization below deals with Medicare Costs and combines a map with a chart showing trends in the data.
Other data visualization examples created with Tableau Public can be found in the Gallery:http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/galleryOther Tableau Public Resources can be found here:https://public.tableau.com/s/resources
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