Is Tableau worth it? Let me work it.
Someone recently asked me about a local course on Tableau and whether or not it was a good deal. This specific course had reduced their price from $4k to $1.5k for a full month of part-time instruction on Excel, SQL, and Tableau. Sounds like a good deal, RIIIGHT? I told this someone to try to teach themself as much Tableau as possible before financially committing to any in-person part-time course. I had heard from peers that Tableau has a fairly intuitive interface, so I believed it shouldn’t be difficult to self-teach the skills involved. There are plenty of free resources on YouTube, written tutorials, and Tableau’s own documentation that could help. This spurred me to put Tableau to the test and really find out for myself how it compares to other data visualization tools available and, how it fits in my toolbox. Below are 3 examples where I try to duplicate and improve visualizations I have programmed with Bokeh, Seaborn, and Plotly using Tableau instead.
The main difference between Tableau and any of these other data visualization tools is self-programming versus automated programming with Tableau. There are programming elements with Tableau, which I will explore further, but a lot can be done in Tableau without creating any calculations. Let’s get ready…
