Summary

Learn the fundamentals of data visualization and practice communicating with data. This course covers how to apply design principles, human perception, color theory, and effective storytelling with data. If you present data to others, aspire to be a business analyst or data scientist, or if you’d like to become more effective with visualization tools, then you can grow your skills with this course.

This course is part of both the Business Analyst and Data Analyst Nanodegree Programs.

Expected Learning

Data visualization skills are tremendously important in today’s data driven economy. Collecting and analysing data is just one step; to communicate your results to clients or your managers, you need to present the data in a coherent and intuitive way. Charts or graphs allow the human brain to visualize and understand large amounts of complex data.

This course will teach you to use data visualization to explore and understand data, and then communicate insights in a powerful and meaningful ways.

This course uses Tableau to create data visualizations. A 6-month educational license for Tableau is included free for Nanodegree students only.

Syllabus

Lesson 1 – Data Visualization Fundamentals

This lesson covers the basics, such as data types, exploratory versus explanatory visualizations, the various ways to encode data (dots, lines, etc), and why visualization matters in the first place.

Lesson 2 – Design Principles

This lesson helps students to use design to get the most out of their visualizations. It answers questions like, which type of chart should I use for an analysis? Or what colors are best? How do I communicate with using size, shape, etc.? You’ll learn more about the importance of limited the amount of data presented in an analysis, and how to use data with integrity.

Lesson 3 – Creating Visualizations with Tableau

In this lesson, you'll learn how to use Tableau to create basic visualizations. First, you'll learn how to import data and create basic charts. Then, you'll use colors, shapes, and other tools to dig deep into data. Finally, you'll use calculations to create new data columns from existing data.

Lesson 4 – Telling Stories with Tableau

You create visualizations to tell stories with your data. Tableau enables this through creating dashboards and narrated stories. In this lesson, you'll learn how to build dashboards and stories with individual figures.

Required Knowledge

• No programming experience required.
• Interested in using data to make better business decisions.
• Tableau license (provided to Nanodegree students at no cost).