Before You Start:

This is the first of a series of blogs aimed at Tableau beginners, by a Tableau beginner – Two months before writing this first post I had not even heard of Tableau! The purpose of this blog series is to help out anyone who is thinking of starting or has just started using Tableau, and maybe give out a few useful pointers or things I wish someone would have explained to me when I was in your shoes

So you have decided to try out Tableau, an excellent idea if I may say so myself.

By now you have probably read a few blog posts, seen a couple of YouTube vids of the “experts” doing some really cool things, and hopefully read Tableau’s own starter kit. If not, don’t worry there is plenty of time yet. First stop is the Tableau Starter Kit if you haven’t read it yet, there is a lot in there but it’s a gold mine, and this is not something you can master overnight (for the most part).

It’s a really good idea to just play for a while, get to know what Tableau does, what is the difference between a measure and a dimension (check Tableau Starter Kit) and the different kinds of graphs etc that you can make to start off with. I would download a simple dataset to start with, the Superstore one is great and is still often used when testing out more advanced stuff, it should be in the bottom left of Tableau when you open the program, but if not follow the link above.

I created my first viz with only an image in my mind, some FAQ’s and a handful of blog posts and YouTube videos.

Try throwing something together with either one of the sample datasets or find one yourself and spend a few hours just playing and figuring out what is and is not possible at this level.

Of course if you have done all this already and are ready to crack on with the next stage, get on over to the next post!