The Tableau website offers an enormous amount of valuable information to its users. The company Tableau has been very proactive in creating great training materials such as white papers, videos, articles, etc., and I’ve seen a continual buildup of this content over the past six years as a daily Tableau user. I really appreciate what they offer to us as users of their product.
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However, I would be willing to bet that many customers are not aware of this great content because once they get their first copy of Tableau, they get so enthralled with using it and learning by trial and error, that they rarely visit the Tableau website for help and guidance. I was guilty of this for a while. Now I am a smarter and wiser Tableau user. I depend upon the Tableau website for my continued learning. As great as it is, however, the Tableau website can bog you down at times. Although the Tableau website is well organized, content rich, diverse, and fairly easy to navigate, sometimes there are too many web pages to explore and I cannot quickly find what I need. There have been many times when I stumbled upon awesome information that I had no idea that existed.
Since I train people to use Tableau as part of my job, I needed a concise reference guide that I could give to my “students” to help them shorten their learning curves and to provide them with guidance as they left the training course and began their Tableau journeys. For all of these reasons, I decided to develop a couple of solutions to help me solve the problems I just discussed.
Tableau Hyperlinks
As with any product, the more you use it, the more you learn (and the more you realize how much you do not know!). If I go do a general web search about a Tableau topic, many times I get too much information and I can’t find what I’m looking for efficiently or quickly. These experiences have prompted me to create my own table of key Tableau links. All you have to do is click on any of the links to get to immediate access to what you need. Currently the table looks like this but is expected to change over time.
After building this table, I’ve used it many times, so I thought I should share it on this blog. It is sometimes surprising how something so simple can be so useful (say that fast 10 times!).
Keyword Searchable Knowledge Base
Additionally, I created the keyword searchable Tableau Knowledge Base for the same reason. This one is also very handy, especially for new users. As an example of this, I recently went to the Tableau search engine to look for some information on dashboards. The Tableau Engine returned what is shown below. Although beautiful and certainly acceptable search results, I couldn’t find what I needed right away.
To find what I needed, I turned to the keyword searchable Knowledge Base and got the following:
This list was more targeted and offered to me all the Tableau Knowledge Base articles that has the word Dashboard or Dashboards in the article title. A result like this makes it much easier to finding information and then to get to use the power of Tableau-provided information. Of course, Tableau Desktop and Tableau Public were instrumental in completing this work!
