Day 1:
We started week 2 training in Tableau. Andy leaded the Monday session about data visualization fundamentals. It is about asking yourself 7 questions:
When? Where? What? Who? How? Why?
A simple chart that conveys the message clearly is always better than a over-complicated one, learn to use subtractions rather than additions on your chart.
When there is a Tableau Zen Master Hall of Fame to teach you, there is learning in every lesson.
Day 2:
Tuesday training was lead by Luke Stoughton. We continued from Monday's session about critic and improve on various data viz given, improve our idea what works in a visualization and what doesn't.
Then we proceed with going through various chart type. Andy had done a great viz on the topic.
Although some chart type is quite simply and straight forward, there are always some details to be learnt, the details matters. The advantage using one chart type over the other.
Human are perceptive to a lot of things, when creating a viz, we are generally more perceptive in the following order
Colour > Size > Shape > Orientation
We shall leverage this to our great advantage when creating a chart. And for anyone has limited drawing skill, Excalidraw is a good place to design a quick dashboard layout.
Day 3:
Wednesday we had session with Steph Kearns to teach us Tableau's dimension(blue) and measure(green) labels. Although the former is often discrete and later is latter is continuous, it is not true all the time. (Check the blog, more posts on the topic are coming.)
Tom Brown's original post is still popular.
Tom Brown
Second half of the day is about connection to the server and the difference between live and extract data.
In Training
Day 4:
Today we had Lorna Brown to teach us sort, group, filter and set action on Tableau. Able to dynamically change the dashboard is always a handy function to have, it offers more interactivity for the user.
(Check out some set action by Hannah from DS 24)
In Training
Day 5:
Another day with project work, always a stressful day. The day's task is to connect data set saved on TIL server, then build a viz for presentation. We had data on Covid rated topics originally open sourced from UK government statistics.
The first practice is to connect to the correct server than find the data for analysis, it was a challenge task initially. The dataset itself is simply, so the emphasis is more on the time management and dashboard layout sketch, personally, I had learned a hard lesson, as I barely managed to stitch up minimally functional dashboard with some set actions.
After our presentation, we attended DS 23 presentation about their internal project - producing Tableau/Alteryx educational content. The impressive output amount continue to set a high bar for us. It is good to see TIL's commitment and constantly contribute to the learning community.
