Tableau: How to Analyze and Deep Dive any type of Data

Welcome to this deep diving course! I'm so excited to be teaching this as its a subject I get asked about a lot; how do I go about or approach data followed by analysis.

I believe once you've developed a general methodology you can apply this to almost any problem. On that note lets do some tutorials and exercises to make you the best analyst I can! Good luck!

What does it mean to deep dive? Quite simply it means understanding your data and finding patterns, trends or proving that there isn't one. However we can go a bit deeper than this. Deep Diving also includes many different techniques as well as the skill to choose the correct visualization for the correct type of data. Needless to say this comes with experience and the willingness to get things wrong from time to time.

I this video we'll go through a simple example of how I approach a data set. Feel free to download the file and follow along but that is not required as we have tutorials and assignments coming up.

In this tutorial we'll be doing an example whereby the manager of a sporting goods store wants to analyze their sales records. The task is to determine if they are operating their business as best they can.

The data set itself includes x3 main sheets of information; their summary profits, individual sales and finally marketing spend per item type.

By combining the 3 we may uncover something interesting that we can advise on to help them with their business.

The goal of this assignment is to determine if there is a relationship between the the heights of the people living in a particular country, the available jean sizes and the profit generated.

In this case I play the role of a jeans manufacturer trying to determine the above. No doubt this is no simple thing but again start basically and add complexity as you go.

The most common analysis you may find is analyzing revenue, sales, profit, etc. But deep diving isn't restricted to this. You can also analyze human behavior or performance.

In this example, we have an insurance company. The idea is to analyze the performance of the workers and see if there are any discernable patterns. Are their differences in their performance? If so, what are they and can they be extended to other team members? 

In this assignment we have customer information in regards to sales. Customers call in about purchasing certain items and the sales team process these requests.

Your job is to analyze the performance of these agents in terms of who are the peak performers as well as who is struggling.

In addition to this we'll need to develop a tracking dashboard to visualize cases requiring further follow up.

Pay gap between men and women is a discussion that comes up when talking about equality in the workplace.

In this data set a survey company has collected the salaries of many people. Our job is to visualize the gap in an interesting way.

There are obviously many ways to do this so let your creativity take charge!

Of all the assignments to date this will be the hardest!

Sometimes we'll receive data and whilst its nice to try and model every field, its just infeasible. Sometimes you may need to make an educated decision in order to keep things simple enough and still tell a compelling story.

In this example, you're job is determine if there is any relationship between gender, age, blood pressure, etc., with the patients coming in and reporting symptoms.

Do the symptoms attack younger people, or older, or higher blood pressure, etc. Good luck!