Visualization Tools¶
Tableau¶
Industry standard for BI dashboards.
- Platform: public.tableau.com
- Docs: help.tableau.com
- Learn: public.tableau.com/learn
- Charts guide: tableau.com/chart
- Viz of the Day: public.tableau.com/discover
| Resource | Description |
|---|---|
| Set up data sources | Connect and prep data |
| Join your data | Combine sources by common fields |
| Relationships | Combine multiple sources |
| Data blending | Query across sources without true join |
| Combining date fields | Handle multiple date columns |
Metabase¶
Open source, lightweight BI. metabase.com
- Self-hosted or cloud
- Question-based query builder
- Native SQL editor
- Dashboards and alerts
- Good for SMBs and internal use
Other options¶
| Tool | Notes |
|---|---|
| Looker / Looker Studio | Google BI; free Studio |
| Power BI | Microsoft BI; tight Excel integration |
| Mode | SQL + Python notebooks + dashboards |
| Hex | Notebooks + apps + SQL |
| Superset | Apache OSS BI |
| Grafana | Time-series and ops dashboards |
| Observable | D3-style notebooks; web-native |
| Flourish | Storytelling visualizations |
| Datawrapper | Newsroom-grade charts |
Web / programmatic¶
- Plotly — Python, R, JS
- Vega-Lite — JSON grammar of graphics
- D3 — low-level JS, full control
- ggplot2 — R, grammar of graphics
- Altair — Vega-Lite for Python
Choosing a tool¶
| If… | Use |
|---|---|
| Enterprise, biggest install base | Tableau / Power BI |
| Tight on budget, small team | Metabase / Looker Studio |
| Already on Google Cloud | Looker / Studio |
| Already on Microsoft 365 | Power BI |
| Need notebook + dashboards | Mode / Hex |
| Devs build it; ops watch it | Grafana |
| Build into a product | Plotly / Vega-Lite / D3 |