Practical Tableau

Chapter 1. How to Learn Tableau: My Top Five Tips

Tableau’s mission is to help people see and understand their data, and I can tell you that after you’ve mastered a few of the fundamentals, it is an extremely easy way to do just that. For basic analyses, such as looking at a measure such as sales, and slicing and dicing that measure by a dimension such as region, I’m not sure anything could be easier than Tableau. However, there can be a substantial learning curve required to get exactly what you want out of the software. In fact, for me personally it has been a career-long education spanning eight years using Tableau. While I’ve been through some growing pains and experienced some frustration learning the tool, I mostly view my lack of perfection as good news. The challenge keeps my job interesting and I continue to get excited discovering innovative solutions to complex problems that have led to several successful visualizations.

This chapter shares my top tips for how to learn Tableau, whether you have a budget of $0 or $5,000.

Tip #5: Follow the Community

Cost: $0

The first of my top five tips is to follow the Tableau community. I have learned several software programs during my career in digital analytics and data visualization, and bar none, Tableau has the most selfless community of the bunch. The great thing about following the community is that you can tailor the list of users you focus on to align with your own uses of Tableau. Perhaps you want to follow users sharing advanced technical know-how, members of the community who are applying Tableau in your own industry, or users more focused on design and user experience.

I’ve put together a Twitter list, Data Viz Heroes, that might be a good starting point for you. These are just a few of my favorite users to learn Tableau from. Remember, this is not a comprehensive list of every outstanding Tableau user, but a short list of users whose style aligns with how I want to use the software.

Some of these users have created aggregated learning resources from several users in the community. One of my favorites is the Data + Science Tableau Reference Guide, maintained by Jeffrey Shaffer (@HighVizAbility). If you can’t quite find what you’re looking for, there is an active community of Tableau users answering specific questions on the community forums.

Lastly, get involved with a local Tableau User Group. This is a free resource where you can meet local Tableau users and learn from what others are doing. Many of my Data Viz Heroes often speak at these meetings. These user groups are all over the world—use this handy Tableau User Group map to find the one closest to you and reach out to the leader to get involved.

Tip #4: Take a Training Class

Cost: $13–$6,000 per day

No matter how many blog posts you’ve read, sometimes you just need to talk to somebody who can help you connect the dots between what you are learning. Attending a Tableau training or data visualization workshop can help you take your skills a significant step forward in a short amount of time. Tableau training comes in many shapes and sizes, and as with the tip about following the community, you should choose your Tableau training based on what you are hoping to get out of the software at this point in your development.

If you would like a recorded training, I recommend the resources available at O’Reilly’s Safari Books Online, Udemy, Pluralsight, or Playfair Data TV. Several of these recorded trainings are taught by qualified instructors, including my Data Viz Heroes.

If you are in need of in-person training, you can attend a one-day training at Tableau’s annual customer conference, a group training conducted by Tableau, an on-site training conducted by Tableau, or an on-site training conducted by a third-party trainer. I attended a group training conducted by Tableau during my second year using the software, and a condensed “analyst” training at a Tableau conference in my third year using it. I can personally attest to the value that attending an in-person training provides.

I’d be a bad consultant if I didn’t mention my Tableau training offering and encourage you to get in touch if you are interested in my personal training services.

Tip #3: Read Up

Cost: $35–$45

There are simply some good books on Tableau available to learn from. This is a great starting point for learning Tableau, and one we sometimes take for granted. When I started using Tableau (“Back in my day….”), there was only one book that I can remember, and it was a very short one. There are now dozens of such resources available. I’m obviously biased toward the book you are currently reading, but among several other great options, here are two that I vouch for:

• Tableau Your Data! by Dan Murray (Wiley)

  This book is possibly the best all-around—ahem, non–Practical Tableau—resource for getting started with Tableau. It provides some of the basic fundamentals, but also discusses more advanced features and Tableau Server.

• Communicating Data with Tableau by Ben Jones (O’Reilly)

  In my opinion, Ben’s book is the best second step, as it is more strategic and provides some ways to think about your approach to data visualization after you have the fundamentals down. It also offers several hands-on walkthroughs for different applications of Tableau.

Tip #2: Practice

Cost: $0

There is no substitute for on-the-job training with your own data and unique business problems. The more challenges you come across and push through to an eventual solution, the more unique tools you get to add to your toolbelt to solve increasingly complex problems that emerge. This may sound obvious, so I will offer an extra tip to help you get the most out of your practice: start a weekly internal meetup.

I call mine Tableau Tuesday. During Tableau Tuesday, a group of 5–10 internal Tableau users get together to train, share case studies of our own work, and/or work collaboratively through challenging situations. These Tableau Tuesday events lead to valuable discussion and ensure that the entire team is continuously learning.

Tip #1: Tableau Public

Cost: $0

I credit Tableau Public as the primary reason for my personal success with Tableau, and thus, it is my number one tip for how to learn Tableau. Tableau Public is a free tool that has almost all of the same functionality as Tableau Desktop (Personal). You can currently connect to and explore Excel, text files, and Google Sheets with up to 15 million rows.

The only catch with Tableau Public is that your files have to be saved to the web, and external audiences can potentially find your work. For this reason, it is not a suitable option for private business data. I actually view this as a positive. This forces you to find topics and data outside of your normal work environment. As I described in my Tableau customer story, Tableau Public is my sandbox to try new approaches to data visualization that in a business setting may not be as appreciated. The cool thing is, these “attempts to fly” are often eventually figured out, and frequently make it into my daily corporate work.

You can also download many of the workbooks you find on Tableau Public. This provides an amazing bevy of dashboards that you can use as a learning resource by downloading, looking under the hood, and reverse engineering. There is an option for the publisher to disallow this feature, but there are still thousands of downloadable dashboards—including every single one of mine. I previously had just one dashboard that was not downloadable, The Cost of Attending the Baseball Championship Series, and that was because it included stadium data of Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City and Citi Field in New York worth thousands of dollars to create. Well, I’m proud to report that even the 2015 Tableau Public Visualization of the Year is now available to download for free!

I unlocked this dashboard for two reasons, which I’ll relate here because they illustrate the spirit of Tableau Public. Steve Wexler of Data Revelations wrote a post called “In Praise of Tableau Public.” In the post, Steve describes all of the things that I love about Tableau Public. Then I came to a line that said, “Unless you indeed have proprietary data please, please, please don’t stop your workbooks from being downloaded.” That’s three pleases. It reminded me of how important Tableau Public is as a resource for people to learn from and have discussions around approaches to data visualization.

Second, after the announcement that this viz received the honor of Tableau Public Viz of the Year, I was immediately asked personally from a new user for the original copy so they could see how it was created. It simply didn’t feel right to keep the dashboard locked. My hope is that Tableau users of any experience level have the opportunity to learn from Tableau Public dashboards so they can incorporate innovations into their own work and continue pushing the envelope in their own ways.

That’s it my for my top five tips for how to learn Tableau. Trust me when I say that everybody is learning! The key is to be persistent. Tableau is user-friendly enough and has so many resources available that anybody who is committed can become an expert.