Hello,
I am quite disappointed in the Tableau Course (I enjoyed all the previous ones). At the end of this one, I don’t feel I have a good idea of how it works and what it can do. At this point, I just leaned that I should find a better Tableau training to be able to use it in a work setting.
I would like to understand more how Tableau “thinks” and more example of visualisations (which is what Tableau is about) and formatting instead of spending that much time on joins and blending (which anyway seem outdated + what is the point of showing us an example of joins that does not work without showing us one that works?). Furthermore we are making basic graphs that could have more easily been done in Excel instead of exploring all the cool new visualisations tableau offers. There is also nothing on “story” . It would have been also amazing to include guidance to draft dashboard s with different examples (you mention it is good practice but how to think about it like a pro?)
Will you update this course or make a new well-rounded one?
Thank you,
Hi Lisa,
sorry to hear you were disappointed in the Tableau course. The Introduction to Tableau course tries to provide an overview of how the software works. In terms of joins and blending, these are part of the logic and implementation of Tableau. That’s why we think that understanding the principles behind that can be an advantage for understanding the software, even if they’re not strictly necessary to be able to use the software. On the contrary, Tableau is very intuitive and aims to make it as easy as possible for users to create visualizations.
And you’re absolutely correct – Tableau is all about visualization! That’s why we have dedicated a part of our Data Visualization course on visualizations with Tableau(along with Excel, Python and R). We always dedicate a part of the lectures on styling and formatting, and we cover basic charts such as bar, pie, line chart, as well as some advanced combination charts, like a regression plot.
You’re welcome to check it out and I hope you’ll find it interesting. Here’s the link to the first lecture:
https://365datascience.teachable.com/courses/1045353/lectures/22109616
Best,
365 Eli
Thank you for your answer. Yes looking forward to the Data Visualisation Course (but I have a looooot of modules to cover first 😉 360Datascience Team, I really appreciate your work and enjoyed your other classes, just thought that as you are always adding courses, it could be a useful feedback if you wanted to improve on this one.
Understanding joining and blending is important. Knowing how to build bar charts and line charts is more important than knowing how to create panel charts or sankey diagrams. In the business environment 95% of your Tableau work will focus around bars, lines and tables (or variations of such as heatmap).
I have no affiliation with the course or this site, but I have 10+ years of Tableau in the commercial environment. Almost all you see on social media are infographics, things that I have never seen used in the corporate world.
In reality, business users don’t understand these “cool” visualisations, so they’re not practical to use in that environment. A lot are just online click-bait. They do look great but have little value in the world of business dashboards.
Hello Andrew,
Thank you for your comment.
I agree that basics are best but coming from the business (marketing) world, I don’t think we covered the basic in this course.
Tableau is presented as an intuitive software but my feeling after this course is that it is actually not straightforward at all.
1) The version presented in the course is outdated – is creating a count of records field still needed? I had count fields in my view, so in which way is it different?
2) Blending and Joins seems to be outdated as well versus relationships that this courses does not cover at all (and Tableau recommend using relationship over the olds methods) – again I feel showing us only an example of joins not working is not great in building confidence, even the blend needed correcting toward the end of the example (why not point out the issue from the beg?).
3) As it is a visualisation software I would have loved to see more examples (including basics) and how to format to make it look pro (in the Excel course there is much more about that). Also how to best export / share with others?
4) What are stories? 5) if the goal is to create dashboards can data sources automatically update (for example to have a daily dashboard)? 6) What would be a good workflow between Excel and Tableau? and so many others 🙂
Obviously I don’t need answers here, but I’ll have to do another course before practicing on my own projects.
Andrew, as a Tableau Expert: do you feel it was well rounded and complete?
I haven’t seen the course so can’t comment. But Tableau isn’t super easy – if it was, consultants (like me) wouldn’t be paid to get things set up correctly. There are so many nuances it’s not possible for any course to cover everything. The Count fields are new (replacing Number of Records https://tarsolutions.co.uk/blog/number-of-records-missing-in-tableau/) but minor. Relationships doesn’t work in all cases, sometimes blending / joining is better. Auto updating data sources and sharing data is all Tableau Server, not Desktop. There are so many different potential data sources, how can it be possible to cover them all in a generic course? But you’re right, Tableau does present itself as super simple, and sometimes it is. But it can also become complicated. And I suggest having a go with your own projects; all courses use simple data sets where everything is smooth and simple. The real world is rarely like that.