Disappointed in Tableau Course

Question

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is what Tableau is about) and formatting instead of spending that much time on joins and blending (which anyway seem outdated + what is the point of showing us an example of joins that does not work without showing us one that works?).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,

Answer 1

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://learn.365datascience.com/courses/the-complete-data-visualization-course-with-python-r-tableau-and-excel/what-does-the-course-cover Best,
365 Eli

Answer 2

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.

Disappointed in Tableau Course

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