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PolyU Library

Online Tools for Assignment

Introduce useful online tools that may help to prepare your assignment.

Tableau Public

Tableau Public is a free data visualization tool that can help you to see and share insights in your data without programming knowledge. The visualization can be shared online or downloaded to your device. Do take note that the completed visualization work and data in Tableau Public are to be made freely accessible to everybody. As a result, we do not recommend you to use this tool if your data involves sensitive information.

We use this Excel file which contains data of CO2 emission from the World Bank to demonstrate how Tableau Public can help us to visualize our data. You may also find more tips from the official video tutorials directly.

  1. Download and install Tableau Public.
  2. Connect the Excel file to Tableau Public.

     
  3. We can import the data from the worksheet of "CO2 Data Cleaned" by dragging it from the sidebar to the middle space. 

     
  4. Then click on sheet 1 at the bottom of the page to go to Worksheet.

     
  5. The data withis spatial data. if we drag the spatial data to the worksheet, it will display a world map as below:

     
  6. We can add more information to the map. For example, we drag the CO2 (kt) to the Size icon to visualize the country with different levels of CO2 emission. We can change the bubble size by clicking on the Size icon again.

     
  7. If we also wish to visualize the CO2 emission by colour, we can drag the CO2 (kt) to the Colour icon. We can edit the colour, opacity, etc by clicking on the Colour icon again.

     
  8. We can give our chart a meaningful title and explore other visualization available by clicking on the Show Me button. Requirement for different visualization is shown at the left bottom corner.

     
  9. To save our works, click on File > Save to Tableau Public..., then Sign In your Tableau Public account. You can register a free account by clicking on Create one now for free. Be aware that the worksheet and data you published to Tableau Public will then be accessible to everybody with a Tableau Public account after you Save your work.

     
  10. We can then click on the download button at the bottom-right corner to download our work in various formats as shown below:

Creative Commons License

Except where otherwise noted, the content of this guide is licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 License.