How To: Your Guide to the Guidebook
Hello and welcome to A Student’s Guidebook to Tableau!
This site was originally created by Maria Brock during her time as a Tableau Student Ambassador, with a mission to make Tableau more approachable for students and newcomers. Her goal was to provide a “one-stop-shop” for learning the basics, navigating the community, and getting started without feeling overwhelmed.
As someone who didn’t come from a formal data or design background myself, I (Eric Balash) connected deeply with her story. I’ve since taken over managing and growing this guide, continuing Maria’s original vision of making it easier for others to get started with Tableau.
Whether you’ve never used Tableau, just downloaded Tableau Public, or are already using it and want to learn more about the broader data community, you’re in the right place. The resources, guides, and links here are designed to help you take that next step with confidence. You’ll find basic how-to’s, community introductions, tips for building a portfolio, and links to great learning content; all pulled together in one place to save you from opening 42 different tabs just to figure out where to start.
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 version and follow along from there.
Everyone’s Tableau journey is different. I hope this guide helps you find your own path, just like it helped me find mine.
– Eric Balash, Tableau Visionary & Tableau Public Ambassador
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!