Tableau Desktop Certified Associate: Exam Guide

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.

Table of Contents

1. Building Your Data Model
2. Working with Worksheets
3. Analyzing Data Using Charts
4. Visualizing Geographic Data
5. Understanding Simple Calculations in Tableau
6. Tableau Table Calculations
7. Level of Detail Expressions
8. Leveraging Analytics Capabilities
9. Building Your Dashboards

Dmitry Anoshin is an expert in analytics with 10 years of experience. He started using Tableau as a primary BI tool in 2011 as a BI consultant at Teradata. He is certified in both Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server. He leads probably the biggest Tableau user community, with more than 2,000 active users. This community has two to three Tableau talks every month led by top Tableau experts, Tableau Zen Masters, Viz Champions, and more. In addition, Dmitry has previously written three books with Packt and reviewed more than seven books. Finally, he is an active speaker at data conferences and helps people to adopt cloud analytics.

Jean-Charles (JC) Gillet is a seasoned business analyst with over 7 years of experience with SQL at both a large-scale multinational company in the United Kingdom and a smaller firm in the United States, and 5 years of Tableau experience. He has been holding Tableau and SQL office hours for multiple years to share his expertise with his colleagues, as well as delivering SQL training. A French national, JC holds a master's degree in executive engineering from Mines ParisTech and is a Tableau Desktop Certified Associate.

In his free time, he enjoys spending time with his wife and daughter (to whom he dedicates his work on this book), and playing team handball, having competed in national championships.

Fabian Peri's interest in decision analysis started after joining his first fantasy basketball league in 2006. His love for data analysis led him to pursue an MBA in information systems at the University of Tulsa, and then an MS in predictive analytics from Northwestern University. Since graduating, he has primarily worked in risk analysis and management for companies such as Amazon, GE Capital, and Wells Fargo. He is currently focused on using visualization to explore and interpret vast quantities of data.

Radhika Biyani is currently working as a recruitment insights analyst with Amazon. Before this, she worked as an analytics consultant with Version 1, where she consulted on several large-scale BI and analytics projects with clients across various industry verticals such as HR, finance, utility, supply chain, and more. She holds a master's degree in business analytics and has many certifications, including Tableau Qualified Associate. She enjoys attending meetups and is an active member of many meetup groups, including Tableau User Group Dublin.

Gleb Makarenko began using Tableau in 2018 and quickly fell in love with how intuitive and easy to use the software was. He was able to easily adapt to its interface and create powerful visualizations. That is when he decided to get certified on Tableau software in order to receive proper credentials that he could use on his resume, as well as learn about the intricacies of the software that he wasn't using at the time. With a bit of effort and research, Gleb was able to complete the examination. And he recommends the same to anyone who is serious about working with Tableau.