Innovative Tableau

Chapter 1. How to Learn Tableau

The single most-common question I’m asked is, “What advice do you have for someone getting started with Tableau?” In Practical Tableau, I covered my top five tips for learning Tableau, but as the product itself evolves, so do the resources for helping you get the most out of the software. This chapter provides my top tips for getting the most out of this book and beyond as you continue your Tableau journey.

Read

Look at you—already off to a great start! I am naturally partial to the book that you are reading now, but there are several great authors who have inspired me, and Tableau books from which I have learned.

For visualization applications beyond both Practical Tableau and Innovative Tableau, I recommend Communicating Data with Tableau (O’Reilly, 2014) by Ben Jones, founder of Data Literacy.

For additional technical know-how, I recommend reading anything from Joshua Milligan, including Learning Tableau (Packt, 2019).

For inspiration, I recommend The Big Book of Dashboards (Wiley, 2017) from Andy Cotgreave, Jeffrey Shaffer, and Steve Wexler. This is not a Tableau-specific book, but many examples were built in Tableau, and it provides a chance to review critiques from some of the best in the industry.

As for Innovative Tableau, keep an eye out for the kingfisher icon throughout the rest of this title. This reader aid indicates when a prerequisite for the chapter you are reading has been covered in greater detail within Practical Tableau.

Introducing Playfair Data TV

Since the release of Practical Tableau, my company has launched its own on-demand Tableau training platform, Playfair Data TV. With more than one hundred video tutorials and new content released every month, Playfair Data TV is already one of the largest and fast-growing collections of Tableau video tutorials available. This type of video training helps complement and reinforce your learning with additional context.

Other video instructors and platforms I recommend are Matt Francis’s Udemy course and the content from Pluralsight’s all-star team of authors, including Adam Crahen, Pooja Gandhi, Ann Jackson, Lilach Manheim, Curtis Harris, and Michael Mixon. Each of these authors selflessly gives their knowledge away, and I am grateful for their contributions.

Playfair Data TV was launched to complement the expanding video training resources available with some new perspectives on taking a strategic approach to Tableau projects, applying storytelling techniques to Tableau visualizations, and using Tableau tactics in real-world applications. You will find that the format of my video content mirrors that of Innovative Tableau, and you can find the video versions of several chapters there.

Jump into the Community

I mentioned in the Preface that the Tableau community is difficult to explain because it really is so unusual in the world of software. Going to their conference is closer to a family reunion than a trip for work. One of the best things about it is that I can personally guarantee you that the Tableau community will embrace you if you want to join. Here are just a few ideas on how the Tableau community can help your learning progress:

Join a local Tableau User Group

Tableau has established user groups all over the world that typically hold monthly or quarterly meetings. These are groups that are run by and for the community where speakers provide tutorials and/or use cases that are likely relevant for your own work. These meetings are also a great place to network and discover how others are using Tableau to solve their unique business problems.

Get social

The Tableau community is full of avid social media users, particularly on Twitter. What I like most about this channel is that it provides a source of inspiration, encouragement, and built-in peer review should you choose to share your work.

Use the forums

I still don’t know how they do it, but rarely does a valid forum question go unanswered. If you find yourself stuck and have already checked to ensure a similar use case has not been solved, try to post your question on Tableau’s user forums. You will likely receive help, and your question and its solution will help somebody searching in the future.

Attend a Live Training

If the books, videos, and community just can’t quite make things click for you—or if you just want a jumpstart to mastering Tableau—an in-person training may be for you. As much as I try to be thorough and structure my writing in an intuitive way, sometimes you just need a live trainer to help you connect the dots. For this reason, we have developed our own series of Tableau training workshops covering Fundamentals, Advanced, and Tableau Prep curriculums, which are hosted throughout North America.

These events are more like mini conferences than technical trainings, with networking breakfasts and lunches, one-on-one coaching, inspiration, and lots of giveaways!

I also vouch for Tableau’s own two-day trainings, which you can find just about anywhere. My career benefited greatly in my second year using Tableau from attending an advanced training taught by Molly Monsey.

Practice with Tableau Public

As far as I’m concerned, Tableau Public is still the undisputed best way to improve with Tableau. Tableau Public is a free version of Tableau that has almost all of the same capabilities as Tableau Desktop. The catch is you must save your work to the public web where anybody can see it, so it is not a suitable solution for private work data. I view this as a benefit because it forces you to use data outside of work.

Tableau Public has a way of becoming a sandbox in which you can experiment with data you are personally interested in; inevitably, you will pick up new techniques that you can then apply at your day job. Not to mention that Tableau Public provides a portfolio of hundreds of thousands of visualizations from which you can draw inspiration. You can download many of these workbooks and then reverse-engineer them and pick up technical know-how.

I always say that if you buy into my training ecosystem, including the book you are reading now, I can help get you to roughly the eightieth percentile of Tableau users worldwide—but the rest of the way is up to you. Learning Tableau is like learning a foreign language, and no matter how much you learn, if you do not practice, your skills will deteriorate over time. Tableau Public is the best tool for staying sharp and perfecting the skills that you’ll acquire in the coming chapters.