Tableau for Beginners

Why should you use Tableau?

Tableau, as we mentioned above, is the gold standard in analytics and business intelligence. It is a widely used tool in the industry, both in big firms as well as startups. Tableau helps us create effective, impactful and beautiful dashboards and stories that our clients and stakeholders love.

There are a ton of job vacancies for Tableau professionals in the industry so this is a great time to get started.

Tableau Desktop or Tableau Public - which one should I choose?

Tableau Desktop and Tableau Public are two of the many offerings by Tableau. Tableau Desktop is the premium version of Tableau Public. It is used by organizations worldwide for their analytics and business intelligence projects. You will be working with Tableau Desktop in the industry.

Tableau Public, on the other hand, is a free platform to learn Tableau. It was created with the purpose of making the broader audience comfortable with Tableau and how it works. Tableau Public offers almost all the features of Tableau Desktop (except you can’t save your work on your local machine - it will be uploaded to Tableau’s public gallery).

You can perform all the work provided in this course in Tableau Public.

What are the different tools under the Tableau umbrella?

Tableau offers a variety of tools catering to different organizations and solutions:

• Tableau Desktop
• Tableau Public
• Tableau Prep
• Tableau Server
• Tableau Online

And many other tools you can check out on Tableau’s official website.

Where can you learn about the intermediate-level of Tableau?

Excellent question! We recommend taking the ‘Mastering Tableau from Scratch: Become a Data Visualization Rockstar’ course to deep dive into Tableau. You will learn how to quickly convert your data into actionable insights, create dashboards to impress your clients, and learn Tableau tips, tricks and best practices in your day-to-day role.

Can I use Tableau for time series forecasting?

Yes, you can. Tableau has an in-built feature for forecasting where you can use the concept of moving average to build forecasts. But keep in mind that this is a crude feature and might not be reliable for your business. Time series is a complex topic and has advanced beyond moving average.

However, Tabelau’s forecast feature does give you a rough idea of what to expect and might work for small businesses or if you’re looking for a quick idea of what to expect from your sales numbers, for example.

Do you need to know programming to learn Tableau?

Not at all. Tableau thrives as a drag-and-drop tool (for the most part). That’s the beauty of Tableau to be honest, you can quickly get started and build awesome visualizations without having to get into any coding or programming.

But knowing simple Excel formulas, such as IF-ELSE, will help you with feature engineering in Tableau. And that is a critical part of a business intelligence analysts skillset.

What kind of projects can you perform using Tableau?

You can take up all sorts of analytics projects next. We suggest heading over to the DataHack platform and picking up any project that catches your interest. Load the dataset into Tableau and get going!