Getting Started
Earlier this year, I woke up and said today will be the day I learn Tableau. I rolled up my sleeves and went straight into watching the first beginner tutorial I found on Youtube with a catchy title like "How to Learn Tableau in 1 Day." About 30 minutes later, I found myself disengaged (I shut my laptop shortly after) and at the start of what would be a slow and painful trek towards building my first Tableau dashboard. Turns out, it didn’t take me 1 day to learn Tableau but rather 2 months because I continued to make technical and non-technical mistakes in my learning process.
These are the five biggest mistakes I made while learning Tableau and how you can avoid them to successfully and efficiently master this popular BI tool.
Mistake #1 | Learning Features of Tableau I Didn’t Need
When I queued up my first Tableau YouTube tutorial, I had a tough time recognizing what features of Tableau I should learn first. The problem was also deeper than that – I didn’t really know the issues in my data storytelling. So when I sat through tutorials, everything seemed like it could be relevant. It makes sense that I would lose interest or get pulled into new tutorials – I lacked the insight and focus needed to make the learning process feel personal.
While this mistake might be difficult to avoid entirely as a beginner, I suggest taking a moment to think about the issues in your data storytelling that you think Tableau can help solve. These might look something like:
- Making your data presentations more interactive and engaging using dashboards.
- Creating beautiful layered maps, and quickly.
- Strengthening your forecasting visualizations utilizing TabPy.
You’ll want to start by learning features that will speak directly to the issues in your analytical process. Tableau’s features are vast and it might serve you better to understand say, Level of Detail (LOD) Expressions before learning how to use custom Mapbox styles in Tableau.
Mistake #2 | Practicing with Irrelevant Datasets
To learn Tableau, you’ll want to have a solid dataset and preferably a ‘real’ one that you can leverage towards your work. Most of my initial practice datasets were very clean and never had to be joined.
If you don’t have a dataset at your disposal, great public datasets can be found [[here](https://github.com/awesomedata/awesome-public-datasets)](https://data.world/datasets/survey), here or here. I suggest working with a dataset that is similar to the type of data that comes across your desk most often. For me, that was survey data so I began making sure that my practice datasets all had Likert scales and demographic data. For you, that could mean looking for datasets with plenty of geographic, numerical or boolean data.
Mistake #3 | Choosing the Wrong Tutorial
I made this mistake several times over. In the process, I learned that some tutorials covered absolutely everything you could know about Tableau while other tutorials covered only the bare essentials. You’ll see these two extremes widely represented in a quick "How to learn Tableau" online search.
The Two Tutorials
Choosing the right tutorial is an exercise in finding two types videos. The first is an introductory tutorial that teaches you the basic features of Tableau. This video should teach you how to download Tableau, connect your data source, build your first worksheet, use popular features like ‘Show Me’ for visualizations and understand Tableau dimensions and measures. For this type of video, I recommend watching the first 1.5 hours of Edureka’s free YouTube course here.
The second type of video is specific to your data analysis. After learning from Mistakes #1 and #2, I turned to focusing on how to leverage Tableau towards visualizing my survey data. I found the perfect content in an upload from Steve Wexler’s presentation at the 2014 Tableau Conference. This video was quite specific to surveys, and successful in helping me clean and reshape my data before uploading it to Tableau. For this second type of video, I suggest looking for niche tutorials on YouTube that use datasets similar to yours and speak to your particular industry.
Tip: Engage tutorials that use the Tableau platform that you’ll be using. For example, you might come to find that a feature you studied in a Tableau Desktop tutorial is not available on Tableau Public. Now that can certainly be disappointing!
These are a couple of other resources you might leverage in your learning process:
- Live Webinars where you can send in your questions and have them answered on the spot! For some webinars, you can even download a demo dataset and work alongside the presenter.
- Free Training Videos that are especially helpful if you’re working with Tableau Desktop.
Once you’ve completed your first project, you’ll likely discover just how versatile Tableau is and then guide your learning more intentionally. You might want to search for tutorials to help you become a calculations wiz or an expert writing impressive lines of Python code within Tableau.
Mistake #4 | Not Spending Enough Time Learning Joins
While I now know a heck of a lot more about inner, left, right and full outer joins thanks to my SQL training, I knew nothing **** about joins when I first started to learn Tableau. I saw this feature in several tutorials but mistakenly categorized it as another feature I didn’t need to know right away. Boy, was I wrong. I had a tough time merging datasets or downright avoided joining data. The most frustrating part in looking back, is that joins are some of the easiest to do in Tableau and integral to data analytics. Taking the time to understand joins and how to apply them is vital.
Mistake #5 | Building a Visualization I Couldn’t Share
My first Tableau dashboard that I spent hours crafting ended up being a partial bust as I soon learned there was no easy way for my client to view the interactive dashboard. Because the data was confidential, I couldn’t upload my work to Tableau Public. The only option I had to consider was guiding my client through installing Tableau Reader onto their desktop. I ended up deciding to instead download and share my work as PDF (a sad moment).
To avoid this mistake, take the time to envision how you plan to deliver your work. If your data is non-confidential, I suggest familiarizing yourself with Tableau Public, even if you are working from Tableau Desktop.
Tip: Tableau Desktop and Tableau Public are the most popular products this company has to offer. The latter is free but comes with certain limitations to the types of data sources you can connect and would not be appropriate if you’re working with confidential data. According to Tableau, "You should not publish confidential data that you want to keep private, like your company’s sales plan or your personal financial information. Once it is posted you should expect that data to be no longer private."
Tableau Desktop is not free but if you’re a student enrolled in an accredited school, you’re in luck. Students can download and access Tableau Desktop for one year, free. If you’re not a student, Tableau does offer a free 14 day trial that you can download here and use to practice.
I recommend accessing the platform you will be using a couple months from now.
And finally…
These five mistakes I made while learning Tableau became lessons that strengthened my learning process overall when it came to self-guided study. Reflecting on them has helped me to become a better student as I take on new technologies. And now, I’m curious to hear from you –
Have you ever engaged a new technology but felt stalled in your learning process? Was it a technology that others seemed to grasp right away?
