The following section explains how to use Tableau Desktop Edition to connect to BigQuery and get the data from BigQuery and create visuals:

1. After opening Tableau Desktop, select Google BigQuery under the Connect To a Server section on the left; then enter your login credentials for BigQuery:

2. At this point, all the tables in your dataset should be displayed on the left:

You can drag and drop the table you are interested in using to the middle section labeled Drop Tables Here. In this case, we want to query the Google Analytics BigQuery test data, so we will click where it says New Custom SQL and enter the following query in the dialog:

SELECT trafficsource.medium as Medium,
COUNT(visitId) as Visits
FROM `google.com:analytics-bigquery.LondonCycleHelmet.ga_sessions_20130910`
GROUP BY Medium

3. Now we can click on Update Now to view the first 10,000 rows of our data. We can also do some simple transformations on our columns, such as changing string values to dates and many others.
4. At the bottom, click on the tab titled Sheet 1 to enter the worksheet view. Tableau's interface allows users to simply drag and drop dimensions and metrics from the left side of the report into the central part to create simple text charts, with a feel much like Excel's pivot chart functionality. This makes Tableau easy to transition to for Excel users.
5. From the Dimensions section on the left-hand-side navigation, drag and drop the Medium dimension into the sheet section. Then drag the Visits metric in the Metric section on the left-hand-side navigation to the Text sub-section in the Marks section. This will create a simple text chart with data from the original query:

6. On the right, click on the button marked Show Me. This should bring up a screen with icons for each graph type that can be created in Tableau:

Tableau helps by shading graph types that are not available based on the data that is currently selected in the report. It will also make suggestions based on the data available. In this case, a bar chart has been preselected for us as our data is a text dimension and a numeric metric. Click on the bar chart. Once clicked, the default sideways bar chart will appear with the data we have selected.

7. Click on the Swap Rows and Columns in the icon bar at the top of the screen to flip the chart from horizontal to vertical: