Top Tableau Resources
Where to start? - Let me help you
Tableau is an amazing tool, and there are a lot of people that love to teach Tableau. For self-learning, this is great if you know where to look.
But if you do not know where to start, this can lead to decision fatigue and shallow scrolling between a lot of different courses that teaches the same thing.
On this page I have tried to summarize all of my favorite resources regarding Tableau that have helped me to my current position as a Data Analyst and Superuser in Tableau.
Overview of resources
The resources are summarized in five subjective categories, which was the best way I could segment the different resource themes:
Andy Kriebel
Tableau Public
Books
Blogs
Community Projects.
Read through it, go through the different links, and let me know in the contact form if you have any specific questions.
Andy Kriebel - Everything you need to increase your skills in Tableau
The best resource for learning Tableau is my opinion is from Andy Kriebel, and the initiatives that he have started.
His Youtube page with 400+ Tableau videos, a lot from initiative Tableau Tips Tuesday is a gold mine if you are looking for almost anything related to Tableau.
One of his initiatives, MakeoverMonday, is a great way to learn new ways to create visualizations and improve how to work with data.
He is also head coach of The Information Lab which has a lot of good Tableau Resources both in terms of their blog and their youtube channel.
Besides these resources, I would really recommend to go to his Tableau Public where you will find more than 1000! different workbooks to take inspiration from.
Tableau Public
Tableau Public is a great place to first learn Tableau.
I would guess that most people that learned Tableau before working with it started out with Tableau Public.
Tableau Public is Free which means that you can just start it up in the browser without having to get a Tableau License.
If you have a Tableau License, I would really recommend to go through and download a lot of inspirational workbooks, like Viz Of The Day, and try to reverse engineer them to learn which methods the authors have used to create them.
Besides loads of inspiring workbooks, that you can also follow and get in your feed, there are resources and videos there that you can use to learn Tableau better.
Books, books, books…
I have always loved to read, and I think even for a such practical tool as Tableau, physical books are needed as well.
To the left are the books I have in my book shelf at the moment related to Tableau and Design.
If you are just starting out with Tableau, Practical Tableau by Ryan Sleeper is a great book to see how you can create a lot of different charts.
Innovative Tableau is fun to read and try out techniques you had not really though of otherwise like ways to utilize parameters and dual axis charts.
storytelling with data by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic is two books that really enhance the design part of visualization. The community storytellingwithdata builds further on these books with challenges and other great things!
Some of the leaders in Tableau, Andy Cotgreave, Jeffrey Shaffer and Steve Wexler have written this amazing book, which is a great book to use to come up with designs for dashboards for different projects at work.
There are so many good Tableau blogs out there!
It seems like people in the Tableau Community loves to share their tips with the world, which makes the blogs out there for Tableau almost Infinite.
To the left I have listed some of the blogs that I think are really good and well worth your time to read, many of them by Tableau Zen masters.
The Flerlage Twins have a lot of blog post of often more advanced Tableau Topics. They make a good weekend read and you will definitely find out things you did not know beforehand. Their guest blogs from some of the best Tableau users in the world are also really worth a read.
SarahLovesData and VizZenData are two great blogs from two Zen Masters. I have utilized Sarahs information for example to prep before certifications. Lindsay has a great project called Project Health Viz about visualizing data related to health and healthcare data.
The Information Lab have a lot of Tableau Training courses that I have participated in before, and also a great blog about everything that have something with Tableau to do.
Finally, Interworks have really good blogs about advanced concepts such as Level of Detail calulations, whereas PlayFair Data have a lot of good tips and tutorials. They partly paved the ground to my favourite Tableau Books mentioned above by Ryan Sleeper.
You can not spell Tableau without Community.
The community surrounding Tableau is amazing and there are a log of different community projects, besides the ever so buzzing Twitter feed.
Some of the one I have participated in are:
Makeover Monday, great way to increase your way to convey a story from a chosen dataset in form of a dashboard.
Workout Wednesday, learn how to work with with visualizations, calculations and parameters to create something pre-specified.
But there are a lot of the other initiatives that sounds really interesting and I think they are worth to look through if you really want to do something with Tableau but do not know where to start.
Some really important projects for the society according to me are :
Diversity in Data, visualizations of gender inequality that still persists today
Project Health Viz, visualizing health and health care
SDG Viz Project, raise awareness to the Sustainable Developement Goals by UN.
Viz for social Good, project to empower non profits with the help of data and visualizations.
Storytelling With Data have some great challenges similar to Makeover Monday.
If you are into sport, Sport Viz Sundays let you analyze data sets related to different sports, Games Night Viz the same but related to different Video Games, or Data Plus Music if you love music.
I promise that you will find a community project for you no matter your interest, dig in and start visualize!