Tepper · MBA
45-885 Data Visualization
Charts and dashboards designed to change a decision.
A Tableau course for MBA students on designing charts and dashboards for executives, and on spotting graphics that mislead. Students design charts and dashboards for executive audiences, and they learn enough about perception and statistics to spot a graphic that misleads.
Topics
- Design of visual information, and Tableau fundamentals
- Principles of visual design, and storytelling with data
- Typography, color, and calculations in Tableau
- Visualizing spatial data
- Dashboards and interactive displays
- Clustering and social network graphs
- Explainable AI, data preparation, and animation
How the course works
No programming is required. Students start as Tableau beginners and finish with calculated fields, parameters, maps, interactive dashboards, and animation. Along the way they rebuild Hans Rosling's Gapminder bubble chart from raw World Bank tables.
Every class opens with a team critiquing a data story published in the last six months, in the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, or ProPublica, and remaking two or three of its charts. Before presenting, teams test their redesign with an AI Data Visualization Coach, a custom GPT I built with my colleague Zoey Jiang. It will not hand over a redesign. It questions the team from three seats: a journalist, a chart designer, and a business stakeholder.
After dashboards, the course covers clustering, network graphs, and explainable AI, so students can chart what a model found and why.
Final projects
The final project is a Tableau workbook with an interactive dashboard and a recorded video that tells its story. Students choose their own question or one of two public datasets. Projects from Spring 2024 and Spring 2025, grouped by type, with one example each.
- Where Netflix's catalog grew, country by country
- Neighborhood income change by zip code in a US metro
- Why eggs got expensive: 50 years of food prices
- Does discounting drive profit? An executive retail dashboard
- What drives YouTube creator revenue?
- 25 years of warming, city by city
- Does payroll buy wins in baseball?
- Do electric cars deliver their certified range?
How the course developed
I took over Data Visualization in Spring 2024 with an evening section. At the time the course mixed Tableau with R and ggplot2. Since Spring 2025 it has been a Tableau course that needs no programming, and for the online hybrid students I recorded a library of about fifty short screencast lessons.
In Fall 2025 I split each week into a lecture and a lab and gave visual design, typography, and color sessions of their own. The final project is a recorded data story of five to seven minutes.
Offerings
- Spring 2024 evening
- Spring 2025 full-time
- Spring 2025 online hybrid
- Fall 2025 full-time
- Spring 2026 full-time
- Spring 2026 online hybrid
Enrolled students get the Tableau workbooks and screencast lessons on Canvas.