http://www.lehigh.edu/~dlh4/College_Numbers_Analysis.twbx

The Tableau tool certainly has a lot of potential. In Microsoft Excel trying to manipulate the data is a little difficult because you have to copy and paste all the cells into the exact format that you need. However in Tableau I think it's great that you can pick which X and Y axis data groups that you want to use and then drag and drop them into place. This cuts down significantly on how much work you have to do to do in order to compare different pieces of data. Also the ability to do many different kinds of visualizations is also helpful.

My choice of data was the college statistical data sets. I first examined the salaries of professors (full time, associate, and assistants) and instantly I could tell which colleges were the highest paying in general. The usual suspects like UCLA and Berkeley stand out. Next I did an examination of tuition and housing costs for in-state undergraduate students. The housing costs for a couple schools are rather extreme in comparison to the rest..... on top of tuition. That reminds me that my tuition bill is due.... Anyway, if you put the tuition/housing chart by the professor salary chart, there is a bit of a visual correlation. Schools with higher tuition and housing costs tend to also have higher paid professors. Makes sense, but now you hae evidence in a visual format.

I also did a chart on college revenue, from tuition, local government, etc. Logically, schools with lower tuition costs have lower revenue from tuition. One thing I would have liked to do with Tableau but did not figure out was if you could combine the values from different sets of data (such as combining all the different professor salary types) and then running a visualization from the resulting data. I think that would be very useful considering how cumbersome it is in Excel.

Overall I felt that Tableau is very useful. Maybe not more useful than Excel (I'd rather struggle with MS Office than pay even more money for software) relative to the costs, but certainly for manipulating data it is more intuitive and user friendly.