The following is a general timeline of my learning curve:
1.) Days: It took me a few days to be able to produce something/anything with my own data. It’s a paradigm shift to work with a calculated field instead of directly manipulating a cell of data like I would in Excel.
2.) Months: I looked at a bunch of the tutorials that Tableau provides for free to answer some specific questions. For example, it used to be difficult to produce a Top N viz, so they had an article about that. Oh yeah, and box-and-whisker used to be a chore (which has since been greatly simplified). Anyway, I did that on and off for the next few months while building simple viz’s and doing my normal job.
3.) A Year: After a year or so I had seen enough other visualizations and done enough online trainings to come up with something new/unique. I had general mastery of the basics, could do some fancy stuff like advanced table calculations, imported some cool custom graphics to help viz’s, and other junk like that. At this point I felt like I knew a thing or two.
4.) To Infinity, and Beyond: At this point I started “training” other people. I use quotes because I wasn’t really an expert. I just happened to know more than someone who was just starting. For example, I worked with a guy who was really sharp with Excel. It took him maybe 3–4 months to get as good as I was because I could show him where I made mistakes and he was really good. Suffice to say he quickly surpassed me. I’m talking beautiful, complex, excellent visualizations. Jorge, if you’re reading this, you were a real Tableau expert.
The first 80% of Tableau is pretty easy to learn. That’s their whole point, which is to make BI visualization easy. The remaining 20% is tough, and you never learn all of it. It’s usually corner cases, or stuff that is so specific you can’t design a general tool to do. There’s always more to learn.
You can find all the Tableau basics and features of Tableau that enable you to do some amazing things in this blog. Kindly go through the blog if you haven’t yet. I am pretty sure that you will find it quite useful.
You can refer to the Tableau Online Course as it will help you in preparing for a career as Software Developer, BI Professional, System and IT Administrator. Most data Scientists appreciate the horsepower of Tableau Desktop paired with the Online or Server versions of the software. Also, you can take a look at this video too.
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