My 5 lessons from working with Tableau professionally
In this article I will go through the 5 best tips I have for someone relatively new to Tableau, but want to start working with it more in a Business Setting.
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Theory vs Practice
The first lesson I have learned is that there is a stark difference between what you learn in “Theory” and what you really use in your daily work.
This is an underlying theme for this whole article, but I will start off giving some of the most striking things I have found out about this here.
With theory I mean what you would do to pass from Certifications, learn from Online Courses, read from common articles or learn from participation in community project.
(This might change with the change in certifications by Tableau)
Theory focuses on creating fancy charts with pre-prepared data
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When I self-studied to learn Tableau a lot of theory that I found online was built around being able to work a lot in the Canvas in Tableau Desktop (Create cool charts, and to some extend work with calculated fields and parameters).
It was not as much focus on building Dashboards, or even less on Tableau Administration, Tableau Server, Tableau Online or data handling.
There are some great community projects out there as well, as Make Over Monday, Tableau Tip Tuesday to mention a few, and they are really fun to participate in as well.
But just as for most of the online courses these are also, mostly, focused on working in the Canvas.
I think the main reason for this focus of theory is that they are built around Tableau Public which is free, and that is easier to focus on the things that everyone can access easily than the administrative things which are more difficult to come by.
In Practice you have to be more general versed in Tableau and the process surrounding it
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This depends on what you will work with exactly of course.
But either if you work as a Business Intelligence Consultant, Data Analyst or something else, you will need to have a more comprehensive approach to how you work with different problems.
There is a quite big chance that you will have to work a lot with Data Governance, i.e. managing the security and integrity of your data. (How will you publish your reports and connect to data sources, who will see your reports.)
Besides this you will also work a lot with how the data is coming in to your reports, either by doing the preparation yourself, or by having close contact with the people working with system architecture or database administration in your organization.
2. Business Needs should come first
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Always have close communication with your stakeholders
This is a very important thing to emphasize when working in Business Intelligence and Data Analytics.
What you want with your reports is that as many people as possible should use them in their daily work. You want to make an impact.
The best way to make an impact is to build the reports then around the business needs.
If you build your reports with close communication with the stake holder, and the report is really giving something of impact to them they will use the report more.
If no-one uses the report - what is the point?
You can spend a week to build a fancy infographics with a lot of parameters and effects, but no-one might use it.
Or you can spend three days to collect information and the correct data that your business need and show it in a table, some filters and a drill down bar chart and everyone uses it.
3. Create Reusable Reports
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You don’t have to reinvent the wheel
I will reuse a tip I have written in two of my previous articles.
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you create a new report.
There are, at least, two positive sides of creating reports that can be re usable in other projects.
You will quicker come to a later stage in the project
By using reusable parts of your previous reports, you can focus more on the business sides (Tip number 2) and less on how you want to design everything in the report.
You can further develop the report easier (And reproducible to other reports)
If you do not use to much legacy when creating your reports, you will have the possibility to easier develop the reports further in a later stage.
If you do this in one of your report you can also take the knowledge with you to develop other reports further in the future.
4. Create Performant Reports
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Don’t overcomplicate visualizations
Steve Wexler from Data Revelations is one of the most prominent speakers of not overcomplicating your visualizations.
In business settings, User Experience is one of the most important things to build your reports around.
This means that there is an important balance between how “advanced” you want to make your reports and how performant you want to make them.
You can use a lot of different parameters and calculations with the meaning of giving a better user experience, but this might also slow down your report and give a worse user experience instead.
You do have to rethink a lot of how you build reports now, when you probably have a lot more data then you had when you worked with some small datasets at home.
Move calculations and data source filters upstream
Another dimension of this is that the work before the data comes in the reports is also very important.
If you can limit the data and perform a lot of calculations before you work with it in Tableau, you might have more wiggle room to also enhance the user experience with custom built filters, more dashboard actions and so on.
All in all, performance will be a much more important factor when you start working with Tableau in a real business settings and a lot of data compared to if you do it in online courses or in community settings!
5. Perfect takes time
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You want to have everything perfect at once…
When I first began with Tableau I liked to participate in Make Over Monday a lot.
I thought it was a great way to get used to the different visualization techniques in Tableau and also to receive feedback from other people that are more knowledgeable in the tool.
A short summary of Make Over Monday is that you should create (Recreate) a visualization with a specific dataset in a short amount of time.
When I started out I had a really hard time to know when I was finished with the visualization as I always wanted to improve it before the deadline.
… but reiterate is a positive thing in work!
In “real life” you will learn that reiteration is a good thing, and not being done with it before the first feedback meeting is how it should be.
As I mentioned earlier, communication with your stakeholders is key.
But it is almost impossible to know exactly how your next project will turn out when you begin with it.
Exactly which data do you have to work with?
Will the proposed dashboard work with the different dimensions you have?
Are there any more people that will be interested in the project in the future if it is extended with new data sources?
Because of all of these unknown in the beginning of a project reiteration comes in very handy when you begin with new projects.
More meetings = Greater chance to meet business demands
Think of it as this.
You begin the project and have a deadline of 10 weeks.
You decide to have feedback meetings every three weeks.
After 10 weeks you would have the very helpful feedback, as from Andy and Eva in Make Over Monday, but instead of just having it once after 10 weeks, you would have it three time although the projects with different angels depending on the project at the time of the meetings.
What if you instead would put 10 weeks in to the projects from the beginning because you wanted to have a finished project before a feedback meeting?
Conclusion
My five tips from working professionally in Tableau are:
Theory vs Practice: You will work less with pre-prepared data, more with data governance and to think about how to bring in the data in practice, compared what you mostly see in online courses and community projects.
Business Needs Should Come First: Create reports that the business needs in communication with stakeholders, not just what you think is fun to create.
Create Reusable Reports: Use templates from earlier reports to be able to focus more on business sides and bringing in the data, than the design of the dashboard.
Create Performant Reports: Do not make overcomplicated visualizations just because you can, and try to move calculations upstream, together with filtering the data. Performance is a very important factor when you work professionally with Tableau.
Perfect Takes Time: You want to have everything perfect at once….. but reiteration is a positive thing in work. Do not hesitate to create prototypes and have meetings with stakeholders before the products feels “Finished”, it will be beneficial in the end.
Questions or inquiries
If you have any questions or input please contact me on
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/elias-nordlinder
Email: Elias.Nordlinder@gmail.com
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Medium: https://elias-nordlinder.medium.com/
Have a great week everyone
//Elias
