Introduction

When done right, learning can be a lot of fun! In contrast to a recent article (The Agony of an Education), I discuss how a simple two-hour Tableau training session led to some happy college students.

Background

I have been teaching Tableau for many years. Some of the lessons learned have been documented in this series. As time goes by, I realize that I can give new Tableau users some really key information within a couple of hours that will help them learn to efficiently and effectively use the software.

The Test

To test this concept, I recently had the opportunity to help guide three college students as they worked on a Tableau-based project. They already had some exposure to Tableau by watching the teacher perform some operations in a classroom setting. As we all know, watching someone do something new in an unfamiliar software package doesn’t automatically teach you how to do it yourself.

Before we began the lesson, however, I asked them if they had any confidence in working with Tableau. Their unanimous answer was “No way!”.

During the initial part of the training (less than 30 minutes), I covered the Tableau fundamentals that I believe are most important for beginners. During this time, I was very impressed by how quickly the students comprehended the material.

I always know whether people are absorbing the material by the time we get to the hands-on section of the training. Since these students had to jump right into their project, I knew immediately that they understood the definitions and how to apply the material.

When It Was Over

The training was over within 2 hours. They completed their work. I would say that they learned a lot and we were able to install some serious Tableau enthusiasm within each of them.

A few days later, I asked them to give me a short video to explain how they felt about Tableau and the training. Their responses are shown below.

Final Thoughts

Teaching people to use Tableau (and Alteryx) is a joy. The reason for this is that the software gives us so much help in producing data insights, that new users can become capable of producing very nice and insightful work in a short amount of time.

At the same time, it can take years to master all the intricacies of Tableau. You can go as deep as you want by performing independent research and generating new approaches to using Tableau.  A good example of this is the very nice work being conducted by Lindsey Poulter on Tableau set actions.

This depth and flexibility that is built into Tableau are two of the reasons that make it so appealing to us. For me, I tend to stick to the basics because Tableau gives me maximum time benefits when used this way.

P.S. The students reported that they received 100% scores on their final projects!