This article best enjoyed in conjunction with my Tableau Public Viz “Colleen’s Tableau Journey,” as presented to the Milwaukee Tableau User Group on 5/30/23. Downloading this dashboard can show you how to use Parameters and dynamically formatted labels, and provide you with links to multiple free Tableau resources.
https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/colleen.hayes8424/viz/ColleensTableauJourney/CareerPathDataViz
Alright, tell me if this sounds familiar – your company has invested in Tableau licenses, and maybe even some Tableau training, but now you’re on your own with hefty business needs to fulfill and not quite enough Tableau knowledge. Oh, and the team’s training budget for the year has been spent or otherwise allocated. What do you do?
In 2017, I found myself in that exact position. After an initial block of Tableau training, my managers had stars in their eyes thinking of all the great things we could create and the knowledge we might expound upon with our new data insights. The catch was that we had no money left for any additional training. I started to Google.
I immediately found that Milwaukee has a very active Tableau User Group and began attending meetings, even though I originally felt like I was out of my element. Over the years, while I’ve found the presentation topics to be informative and relevant to what I needed, the networking sessions were even more useful. Some of the best conversations I had with others over a drink lead me to figuring out the solution to my data viz problem. If you’ve not yet found your local user group, I highly recommend you do!
A year or so later, in 2018, I became one of my company’s Tableau Server Administrators. For more than a year, we had excited Tableau users creating and publishing content to the server with no real rules to regulate anything.
While I knew that Tableau had a robust online community where you could submit issues hoping another user might reply with a resolution or search their knowledge base for issues already resolved, this need was much more nuanced. What do you do with users who’ve not logged in for months? What do you do with stale, unused content? How do you go about setting up a certified data source process?
For me, this turned out to be another instance of how that network I was building at those user group meetings was so valuable – I decided to reach out and ask someone about their company’s server rules. Brandi Beals1 is one of the co-leaders of the Milwaukee Tableau User Group whom I’d gotten to know through the group’s quarterly meetings. If you don’t know Brandi, she’s extremely intelligent and organized, and it’s clear to see that her role as a Tableau Ambassador is well deserved. I reached out to her one day and asked if I might buy her a cup of tea and pick her brain as to Tableau Server Administrative rules and functions. These days, Brandi is quite busy (she’s the leader of the Data Book Club2 and co-Leader of the Data Careers Summit3), but I highly recommend reaching out to someone you’ve met in the Tableau Community. Learn from the folks who already know – their insight is invaluable and more often than not people are happy to share.
In 2020 as we all know, the pandemic hit, and everyone’s career focus shifted dramatically. For me that meant taking required furlough time while also working on some Tableau projects that called for skills I hadn’t acquired yet. As the Google gods would have it, I found just the solution I needed on someone’s Makeover Monday post.
Makeover Monday1 is a project you can work along with lead by two folks, Andy Kriebel and Eva Murray, out of the UK. Every Monday, they post a data set and a video of Andy creating a data visualization with that data. The challenge is to then create your own data viz and post it to social media tagged with #MakeoverMonday. Workout Wednesday2 is similar. Their weekly data viz is published on Wednesdays, with the challenge to recreate it as closely as possible, sharing your creation tagged with #WorkoutWednesday. Both projects are free, encourage Tableau users to learn, and provide examples of data visualizations that may inspire you or provide you with solutions. Look for posts with those hashtags on Twitter and Tableau Public.
By 2022 I was working as a data consultant and found that I’d gotten pretty good at a lot of things in Tableau, but I never quite seemed to have an opportunity to use some of the newer functionality when creating data vizzes for my clients. If you only have a week to create a new dashboard, chances are good that you’re going to skip trying to figure out something new, just in the interest of time. To stretch my skills, I decided to start making my own dashboards where I had more creative control – one per month for all of 2023 – and publish them to Tableau Public1. This challenge has given me a platform to get creative and try out some of the inspiring things I’ve seen others do in their dashboards. If you haven’t subscribed yet, sign up for delivery of the Viz of the Day2. There are some amazingly talented and artistic folks in the Tableau community!
There are many ways to continue learning in the world of Tableau, and hopefully this article has helped you find some. If all else fails, look for me at the next user group meeting!