Chapter 10: Conclusion

Tableau Server is an extremely powerful and valuable tool. When leveraged properly, it can help you increase the utilization of the content on your server, seamlessly manage everyday tasks behind the scenes, manage the security of your data, and can help organize content and share analytic insights throughout your organization.

Tableau Public provides a way for anyone to practice and improve their data visualization skills and get involved with the Tableau community. Doing so will not only sharpen your skillset for your benefit and career potential, but it will also benefit your organization when you apply the data visualization skills you have learned to your daily work.

In this chapter, we will review what you have learned throughout this book and provide suggested resources that will help you further your skills in data visualization, Tableau Desktop, and Tableau Server.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• What you have learned...

What you have learned

We hope this book has helped reveal many of the major benefits of Tableau Server to regular everyday users. Understanding how to leverage this platform will help you communicate information through data and drive better analytical insights. If this book has helped you get up and running with Tableau Server, increased end user engagement with content, and reduced redundant tasks, then it has accomplished its goals.

In this book, you explored Tableau Server's structure and learned how to get started by getting connected, publishing content, and navigating the software interface. You also explored how to interact with the Tableau Server interface to efficiently locate, sort, filter, manage, and customize content. Later, you discovered how to leverage valuable features that enable you and your audience to share, download, edit, and interact with content on Tableau Server. You even learned how to automate repetitive tasks by utilizing features such as alerts...

Why and how to get involved with the Tableau community

One of the most important things that sets Tableau apart is its community. We have personally never used another piece of software that has as robust of a community as Tableau. The Tableau community is made up of Tableau users who are eager to learn more and support others. They range from complete novices to recognized experts and have a variety of skillsets. They are passionate about data analytics, visualizing information, networking, and building relationships. They help and encourage each other, challenge one another, share ideas and information, and inspire one another to help elevate the graphicacy and data literacy of those involved. These data-literate individuals help propagate this new knowledge throughout their respective organizations and groups.

Why get involved?

It can be intimidating to try and enter a new community, particularly if you are new to using the software or are not confident in your skillset yet...

Where to find data for personal projects

One of the most challenging aspects of getting started when building a Tableau Public portfolio is finding data to use in your analysis. The good news is that there is a wealth of data out there – you just have to know where to look.

The following are some of our favorite places to find data sources:

• Community data initiatives: Initiatives such as #RWFD, as discussed in the previous section.
• data.world: Create a free community account to access 100,000+ open datasets.
• kaggle.com: Create a free account to access open datasets in a variety of formats.
• Wikipedia: Use this site to compile data sources or find tables of existing data. Note that tables of data copied from a web browser and pasted into a spreadsheet may contain hidden characters and present formatting and cleanup challenges.
• catalog.data.gov: An extensive catalog of open data available in multiple formats from the US government.
• data.census.gov...

Additional resources

It would be impossible to list every helpful resource available as more content is created every day. This is another reason to get involved with the Tableau community. By getting plugged in, you will be made aware of new content and resources.

The following lists include some of our favorite and most recommended resources. We hope they serve you well.

Blogs

• Adam Mico: https://adammico.medium.com
• Data Muggle: https://juditbekker.com
• Playfair Data: https://playfairdata.com/blog
• Sons of Hierarchies: http://sonsofhierarchies.com
• The Flerlage Twins: https://www.flerlagetwins.com
• VizArtPandey: https://vizartpandey.com

Books

• Avoiding Data Pitfalls by Ben Jones
• The Big Book of Dashboards by Jeffrey Shaffer, Steve Wexler, Andy Cotgreave
• The Big Picture by Steve Wexler
• How Charts Lie by Alberto Cairo
• Learning Tableau 2020 by Joshua N. Milligan
• Practical Tableau by Ryan Sleeper
• Steal Like an Artist...

Thank you

We appreciate you reading this far. We hope that this book has helped you gain confidence in maximizing Tableau Server. Lastly, we hope this book has sparked an interest or fanned an existing flame regarding data analytics and data visualization.

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