Are you as Tableau-smart as a Tableau consultant?

I joined Tableau in September 2013 as a product consultant. We PCs are Tableau experts. We help with all things product-related, from technical sales to internal support and training, to content development. Basically, if you have a problem in Tableau, you get help from a PC.

So how did I become a Tableau expert after graduating with a degree in Environmental Science and Studio Art? How did I go from possessing weak Excel skills to writing advanced calculations and nested LOD Expressions?

It started with solving customer challenges. In the beginning, they were easy:

“How do I connect to my data?”

And then I had to solve slightly more difficult problems like this one:

“I want to highlight all of the weeks that have sales above a threshold and then for all of the weeks above the threshold label the last week in a row with the total amount of sales above the threshold in the consecutive series.”

Every time I solved a customer challenge like the one above, I would document the solution so that I could reference it in the future. Eventually I had built a library of practical solutions that I could use to easily answer any Tableau question.

Solving these customer challenges proved to be the most effective way of learning Tableau. I noticed that this was not just true for me, but for all of the PCs around me. So I turned my library of Tableau solutions into a library of Tableau challenges. I called this the challenge workbook.

Every new PC starts working through the challenge workbook on the first day. The goal is to become an expert before ever getting on a customer call. This works so well for us internally that I thought it would only be fair to share with our community! So without further ado, I present to you the Tableau challenge workbook, which I first shared with TC15 attendees earlier this week: