I've been learning Tableau since I learned out the coffee company I work for uses it for data presentation. It's an absolutely amazing powerful program, but I've noticed a 'program power' correlation. The more powerful the program, the easier it is to get lost in it an have nothing to show for 3 hours of work.
Over the years I've become semi-expert in many very powerful and robust programs mostly from my music career, specifically Sibelius, Photoshop, and Ableton Live.
What I've mostly learned is that watching videos to get a specific thing done is super useful and copy whatever structures you can to make your life easier.
It might be important to note here that I learned the absolute hardest way I could have. It's embarrassing how many hours I've spent trying to learn something difficult on one of these programs when another way would have been simpler if I'd just copied someone else's structure. Once I began copying structures my productivity and the pleasure I took in each project magnified.
So today I looked up a public dashboard on Tableau and decided I would try to replicate that with my automated coffee data. I didn't spend a lot of time on making sure it was perfect, I just copied the structure and spent a little time in the end touching up the horrendous parts.
There was a moment where I started to get caught up and off track, trying to look up "tips for data dashboards," but I realize now I mostly ignored that info and got the most done copying someone else that had created something I liked. Now I can go back and I think those tips will help me infinitely more because I have a much better grasp of what they mean. more soon...
Here is my first full dashboard created in tableau. I copied the format from Raynaldo Vasquez' 2020 Presidential Poll Tracking Dashboard.
Below is the comparison:
Presidential Poll Tracking
My Mock Coffee Data
