Leveling Up My Tableau Skills — Part 3

This is the third post in a series devoted to my effort to upgrade my knowledge of Tableau from just above basic to advanced and fluent. To see how it all started please check my previous posts: Part 1 and Part 2.

This time I will begin with the things that didn’t go so well. One of my goals is to familiarize myself with Tableau Server/Cloud configurations in order to be able to implement Tableau as a self-service tool for users. Someone recommended that I watch a YouTube video recording of a presentation at one of Tableau conferences — ‘What’s in the box?! A Tableau Server deep dive’, and I was very excited about the idea of immediately diving deep. Unfortunately, however, I couldn’t really follow the presenter, as I was not prepared for the content.

What I experienced with this video is another example of a rule that applies to every subject area where new knowledge builds on top of the existing knowledge: if there is a gap between your knowledge and new content, you will underperform. For optimal learning performance you need an overlap. I did not just make this up: there is a ton of research showing that we learn much better if new information contains familiar elements (if you are interested to learn more, start here).

I will have to change my approach to learning about Tableau Server and Tableau Cloud configs and…