Tableau Foundations

Tableau Foundations

Practical Skills for Immediate Impact - 2 days

In a data-first world, the ability to quickly turn raw data into intuitive visuals is a competitive advantage. Over two days, this course equips participants with industry-tested workflows in Tableau Desktop and Cloud. Grounded in three decades of real-world BI consulting, it emphasizes hands-on application, practical problem solving, and real datasets—no fluff, no theory.

With 30+ years spanning BI consulting, data warehousing, and dashboard development across finance, retail, and healthcare, the instructor delivers industry-centered training. You’ll work with real client-style datasets, explore best-practice governance, and build dashboards built to solve real challenges.

Learning Outcomes

Participants will be able to:

• Install and navigate Tableau Desktop
• Connect to diverse data sources, apply joins, blends, extracts
• Create core chart types (bar, line, scatter, pie, histogram, maps)
• Build interactive dashboards with filters, parameters, actions
• Use calculations, table calculations, and Level of Detail (LOD) expressions
• Leverage analytics features: trend lines, reference lines, forecasting
• Implement best practices in dashboard design and data governance
• Publish to Tableau Cloud and manage permissions and data refreshes

Prerequisites

• Basic spreadsheet familiarity (Excel/Google Sheets)
• No prior Tableau or BI tool experience required

Detailed Training Outline

1. Getting Started and Setup

• Overview of Tableau product ecosystem (Desktop, Cloud, Prep Builder, Public)
• Installing Tableau; working with .twb, .twbx files; interface fundamentals

1. Connecting to Data

• Connecting to Excel, CSV, SQL, cloud sources
• Comparing live connections vs. extracts
• Joins, unions, blends, relationships in modern semantic data model

1. Core Visual Analytics

• Differentiating dimensions vs. measures; discrete vs. continuous
• Creating bar, line, scatter, pie, histogram, and map charts
• Introduction to Show Me panel for quick chart generation

1. Calculations and Data Structuring

• Basic calculated fields: arithmetic, date, string, logical
• Table calculations: running totals, percent of total, ranking
• LOD expressions: FIXED, INCLUDE, EXCLUDE for advanced aggregation

1. Intermediate Charts and Analytics

• Building advanced charts: dual-axis, bullet, waterfall
• Adding reference lines, bands, trend lines, forecasting
• Intro to clustering and sets for segment analysis

1. Interactive Dashboards

• Combining worksheets into dashboards; layout and formatting principles
• Adding filters, parameters, highlight and URL actions
• Custom tooltips and interactivity for user-driven insights

1. Mapping and Geo-Analytics

• Working with geographic data (cities, postal codes, lat/long)
• Advanced mapping techniques: layers, territories, custom shapes

1. Data Preparation and Cleansing

• Tableau Prep basics: cleaning, pivoting, shaping
• Using relationships to maintain clean data models

1. Publishing, Governance, and Cloud Features

• Publishing workbooks and data sources to Tableau Cloud
• Setting refresh schedules, managing permissions
• Custom themes, formatting, naming conventions, folder structures