How To: Your Guide to the Guidebook
Hello and welcome to A Student’s Guidebook to Tableau!
If you’re a student or newcomer who has never heard of Tableau before, who has picked it up, or who already uses it regularly but may not know of other things like projects and the community, you’ve come to the right place. This website is geared towards students, but can be helpful for anyone learning Tableau! In this blog I use and reference Tableau Desktop, since students get a free license. However, if you don’t have access to Tableau Desktop, feel free to download the free Tableau Public and follow along from there.
I hope that this guide will serve you as a “one-stop-shop” in starting out with Tableau. This site is where resources, tips, and step-by-step articles are all together in one place.
When I first started using Tableau, I quickly got overwhelmed with the amount of information out there. I didn’t know where to start to get simple steps in learning the basics of Tableau, and I ended up down several rabbit holes (and 42 tabs on my computer) of articles, blogs, YouTube tutorials, and forums. It was like trying to drink at a fire hydrant. On top of taking a full class schedule, it was hard for me to put aside time to study Tableau when the process of actually finding help was so time-consuming. I wished I had a “How To: for Dummies” that I could understand on my terms as a student barely out in the working world. Hopefully, this guide can be your “How To”.
On this site, I’ve written a few guides walking you through the very basic building blocks in Tableau, articles on the what and who of the Tableau community, some tips on building out your portfolio, and a big list of resources to help you get started.
I’m still a student, and I’m still learning as well. These tips and resources come from my own steps that I took and what I’ve learned and utilized so far. There’s not one way to get started with Tableau; every student will take their own path, but I hope that this guidebook will prove useful to you starting out.
CONTENT GUIDE
This category contains an article describing what Tableau is and how it can help you boost your resume and become even more competitive in the job market. There are also articles to help you download Tableau and examine the flow of the workspace.
These articles will help walk you through building basic charts and interactive dashboards in Tableau, as well as teaching you how Tableau interacts with and reads your data to build those views.
Tableau Public is where you can build your online portfolio, and these articles will help you create your profile, upload your visualizations, and start you off with tips to find data sets, projects, and build an interactive resume.
These articles will introduce you to what the community is, how to find them, and how the community can help you in your career.
Here you can find a big list of resources (e-learning, datasets, blogs, podcasts, and more) to get you started on your Tableau journey.
This section contains interviews from students who have used Tableau and want to share their experiences with it.
Go forth and do good with data!