Tableau Desktop Certified Associate: Exam Guide

Develop your Tableau skills and prepare for Tableau certification with tips from industry experts

Dmitry Anoshin, JC Gillet, Fabian Peri, Radhika Biyani, Gleb Makarenko

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838986643
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Certification Guides in Computer Science
• Index: Computer Science

Learn through hands-on exercises covering a variety of topics including data connections, analytics, and dashboards to effectively prepare for the Tableau Desktop Certified Associate exam

Key Features

• Prepare for the Tableau Desktop Certified Associate exam with the help of tips and techniques shared by experts
• Implement Tableau's advanced analytical capabilities such as forecasting
• Delve into advanced Tableau features and explore best practices for building dashboards

Book Description

The Tableau Desktop Certified Associate exam measures your knowledge of Tableau Desktop and your ability to work with data and data visualization techniques. This book will help you to become well-versed in Tableau software and use its business intelligence (BI) features to solve BI and analytics challenges.

With the help of this book, you'll explore the authors' success stories and their experience with Tableau. You'll start by understanding the importance of Tableau certification and the different certification exams, along with covering the exam format, Tableau basics, and best practices for preparing data for analysis and visualization. The book builds on your knowledge of advanced Tableau topics such as table calculations for solving problems. You'll learn to effectively visualize geographic data using vector maps. Later, you'll discover the analytics capabilities of Tableau by learning how to use features such as forecasting. Finally, you'll understand how to build and customize dashboards, while ensuring they convey information effectively. Every chapter has examples and tests to reinforce your learning, along with mock tests in the last section.

By the end of this book, you'll be able to efficiently prepare for the certification exam with the help of mock tests, detailed explanations, and expert advice from the authors.

What you will learn

• Apply Tableau best practices to analyze and visualize data
• Use Tableau to visualize geographic data using vector maps
• Create charts to gain productive insights into data and make quality-driven decisions
• Implement advanced analytics techniques to identify and forecast key values
• Prepare customized table calculations to compute specific values
• Answer questions based on the Tableau Desktop Certified Associate exam with the help of mock tests

Who this book is for

This Tableau certification book is for business analysts, BI professionals, and data analysts who want to become certified Tableau Desktop Associates and solve a range of data science and business intelligence problems using this example-packed guide. Some experience in Tableau Desktop is expected to get the most out of this book.

Section 1: Getting Started with Tableau

In this section, you will learn about the concepts of Tableau and how to install Tableau Desktop.

This section comprises the following chapter:

• Chapter 1, Building Your Data Model

Building Your Data Model

Data analysis and visualization go hand in hand. Tableau allows users to perform in-depth data analysis and share results via interactive visualizations. Tableau includes numerous data modeling capabilities that allow users to make sense of data and to obtain meaningful insights, without having to deal with advanced database concepts. Data modeling is an important concept, and the more data you are working with, the more important it is.

As the amount of information we work with grows, we need to be able to efficiently perform analysis. Data modeling allows us to not only prepare for our analysis but to also make it as efficient as possible. At the end of the day, we use data to help us make better decisions. Spending time learning how we can model the data will help us identify what questions we can answer, and how to answer them. Regardless of the size of the data you are working with, Tableau will help you glean insights with ease.

This chapter will explain how to connect to your data and use Tableau's data modeling capabilities to begin your analysis.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Initial preparation
• Connecting to your data
• Building your data model
• Preparing your data

Technical requirements

This chapter uses the Global Superstore dataset, which can be found at https://www.tableau.com/sites/default/files/getting_started_data_sets.zip.

Once extracted, you will see two files:

• Global Superstore Orders 2016
• Global Superstore Returns 2016

We believe that following along is the best way to learn and become comfortable with any application. Follow along using the examples provided in this chapter, or find a dataset that you are interested in.

Initial preparation

Before connecting to your data, you need to do a few things. First, you must look for data that will answer your questions. Once you have validated that it exists, where it is stored and how to acquire access/permissions (if necessary). In most cases, you will be connecting directly to a database using a username and password. However, you can also connect to files such as Excel workbooks on your local machine. You can even use a combination of both if needs be.

The Global Superstore dataset

The Global Superstore dataset is data from a fictional global retail chain that sells office supplies. In the real world, you will most likely be connecting to databases; however, working with Excel files is similar – sheets in Excel are treated similarly to tables in a database. The data in these workbooks is similar to what you would see in a database.

The Global Superstore dataset consists of one Excel workbook and one Excel CSV file:

• Global Superstore Orders 2016 (.xlsx)
  Sheet 1: Orders
  Sheet 2: People
• Global Superstore Returns 2016 (.csv)
  Sheet 1: Global Superstore Returns 2016

The Orders sheet contains sales data where each record (Row ID) represents a single transaction:

The People sheet contains a mapping of persons to region:

The Global Superstore Returns 2016 sheet contains order IDs for returned orders by region:

We have found the data we need for our analysis, we know where it's located, and have access to use it. Now we will move on to connecting to the data source with Tableau.

It is always a good idea to get an idea of the data you are working with by viewing a few records. If you are working with an Excel file, open it in Excel to get a feel for the dataset.

Connecting to your data

Before diving into your data, you have to connect to it. Tableau allows you to connect to numerous data sources. You can connect to files on your...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright and Credits
• About Packt
• Contributors
• Preface
• Section 1: Getting Started with Tableau
• Building Your Data Model
• Section 2: Answering Questions with Data
• Working with Worksheets
• Analyzing Data Using Charts
• Visualizing Geographic Data
• Understanding Simple Calculations in Tableau
• Section 3: Advanced Tableau
• Tableau Table Calculations
• Level of Detail Expressions
• Leveraging Analytics Capabilities
• Building Your Dashboards
• Mock Test A + B (Assessment)
• Other Books You May Enjoy