What is Tableau?
From business intelligence to academic research, Tableau is a leader in the world of data – and rightfully so.
In recent years Tableau has released a free version of Tableau called Tableau Public. This free version provides all of the same wonderful visualization tools as paid variants with a few key drawbacks.
- You can only connect to several data sources (No SQL databases)
- You cannot save Tableau projects locally
- Your projects must be published on Tableau’s website
Despite these drawbacks, Tableau Public is a great way to start using Tableau software.
In this example, I am using Tableau Public to visualize the percentage of homes with a mortgage and the percentage of people with a bachelor’s degree in the state of Texas.
All visualizations draw data from the 2017 American Community Survey.
Visualize the Data
Firstly, let’s look at the percentage of homes with a mortgage across census tracts in Texas.
Percentage of Homes with a Mortgage
The percentage of homes with a mortgage in Texas census tracts
Areas with high percentages of homes with a mortgage are concentrated in specific areas such as north Dallas-Ft. Worth, Austin, and west Houston.
Now let’s look at a similar map that highlights the percentage of people with a bachelor’s degree.
Percentage of People with a Bachelor’s Degree
With few exceptions, the two maps display similar concentrations around metropolitan areas.
Finally, let’s look at a scatter plot that compares the two variables in one visualization.
Percent with Mortgage vs. Percent with Bachelor’s
The regression line found in this scatter plot was determined to have an R-squared value of .57. As a result, there is some correlation between the two variables.
Overall, this simple exploratory data analysis project just scratches the surface of Tableau’s capabilities.