Christine Rietmann - Accounting

Christine is a Business Administration and Accounting student at the FH Münster University in Germany. She wrote a series of blog posts on taking the Specialist Exam, which you can find here.

How did you hear about Tableau?

Klaus Schulte, a professor from my university, offered a course on Tableau.

How and when did you learn Tableau? Why did you want to?

I learned the basics of Tableau in the said course, which started last year in March and ended in July.

One reason why I was so enthusiastic from the beginning was that Tableau seemed to perfectly combine my interest in data and controlling. Due to the huge amount of data that companies generate daily, I believe that tools like Tableau are indispensable for the future.

I was immediately impressed by the possibilities offered by Tableau. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to continue working with Klaus Schulte during the summer break and to work even more intensively on data analysis.

How has Tableau been helpful/impacted your academic track or career?

Tableau has helped me so far in that I now have a more accurate idea of what my future job should include. And of course, I have learned some new skills. I also discovered my interest in business informatics through Tableau. I will probably focus on this area in the last semester, which I probably wouldn't have done otherwise.

In summer next year I will finish my bachelor studies. After that, I may be able to say more about how it influenced my career ;)

Do you have any advice for students starting out with Tableau?

Use the community for feedback, questions and inspiration and/or look for people who also work with Tableau.

And then it's practice, practice, practice. It's not an insider tip to recommend Makeover Mondays, but since it's perfect for the beginning, I have to mention it again. What I still do a lot to learn new things is to download the work of others. Then I try to understand how they built their charts. Therefore I go into the sheets and first pull out all unimportant pills (e.g. those which are only for colored markings or other inscriptions). After that, I take a closer look at the other pills and try to build the chart by myself.

Follow Christine on Twitter and Tableau Public.