Reading all these posts and following the community is a good way to keep oneself updated about tableau. Now looking at our busy lifestyles, there is very little time to practice things following those posts, at least for many of the tableau developers, who are working in multi-national organizations. But to learn anything, you will have to start practicing it and to master it you will have to practice it regularly.
Tableau community leaders realized this a decade ago. Zen masters Andy Kriebel & Eva Murray created a series called Makeover Monday. This series has flourished since and a great number of people participate in this initiative where you are provided with a dataset every Monday. You can come up with your own storyline, share it with the community, and get feedback. This is a great way to practice your storytelling skills and improving them.
Similarly, Andy Kriebel & Emma Whyte started another series called Workout Wednesday, which focuses on your tableau development knowledge. Every Wednesday, you will be given a view on tableau-public that you need to recreate on your own. There will be some rules that you need to follow while creating it. The solution of the workbook is posted within 3-4 days.
Both the initiatives are very helpful if you are starting with tableau. They just require some enthusiasm, little of your time, and one Tableau Public account, which is free to use with tableau public desktop.
These initiatives help to measure your ability to read data, gives you a chance to learn more about the analysis, and answering questions with data. You can also learn by looking into the process followed by other participants. Andy recently started a Youtube series called Watch me Viz where you can watch him creating makeover Monday Visualization live. It is so engaging and helpful if you want to know how to think about different charts and views, and how to read the data.
You can even track your submission to these 2 initiatives by submitting your entry on the forms on these websites. Till the time this post was written, there were 2,106 participants and 8,983 submissions on MakeoverMonday 2020 edition. Thant's a huge number of participants!
Isn’t it wonderful that how the tableau community comes together to engage more people in tableau related discussions and spends time creating data so that community can practice and learn more? This not only helps people personally but also professionally. All these initiatives are voluntary and open to everyone. If you are looking forward to learning and improve on the tableau and you can spend a few hours every week, these are the initiatives you definitely should follow (at least the above 2 mentioned initiatives).
There are many other interesting initiatives like SportsVizSunday, IronQuest, SDGViz Project, etc. which are practiced every month instead of every week. These initiatives are less intense and focus on big stories. If you have less time to spend on tableau-public but still want to improve your learning curve, you can follow these and post your work once a month.
So, if you are new to tableau and determined to improve your data visualization skills, start participating in Makeover Monday and Workout Wednesdays initiatives. Happy Vizing.
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