In 2015, the year when I turned 25, I was already popular among folks for being able to solve problems with Microsoft Excel; I had made hundreds of PowerPoint slides and never wrote a SQL code. I had an honors bachelor degree in English Literature and did not know a thing about computer science. I had love for numbers and had taken a class on inferential statistics by Dr. Çetinkaya-Rundel. Then Tableau happened to me.

Like most of the people, I played around with the software and decided to learn it on my own. And it really worked. There is the community, amazing on-demand videos and Tableau Public. But learning resources is not what I am going to discuss in this post. I will rather discuss my perception of the software and the learning process that was going inside me as I was learning software.

Tableau : Art or Science?

As I was writing calculated fields, thinking of visualizations and creating charts, coming out of Excel's cellular mindset was not easy for me. But at the same time, I also had realized that this is not the right way to do it.

I will have to unlearn if I want to learn Tableau.

So I unlearned. I started fresh and asked myself, "What does Tableau do for me?" and the answer came from within me, "Tableau lets me communicate my ideas to others." That was it. I was not dealing with an IT tool, I was actually dealing with a communication tool.

In that sense, Tableau seemed much more similar to PowerPoint as compared to Excel. I embraced all the knowledge I had gained from using PowerPoint over the years - the power of storytelling. All of a sudden what was the science to me, became the art. The Tableau canvas literally became the canvas to communicate my ideas to others. All I had to do was

to learn how to operate this thing (which online tutorials did a great job at)

and dive into the data to find interesting and unique insights

outline a story around it

And to create a neat, creative and minimal piece of art

that engaged audiences and gave them what they wanted (consciously and subconsciously)

The science of Tableau - learning the technical stuff has been not so difficult for me so far. The self intuitive UI of the software, easy to create drag and drop functionality and self recommended charts really do a good job at that. Once you know the option, you just know it, you can keep using it over and over again. What has been the most challenging part of the Tableau is learning the art of Tableau - finding a story (though not as hard because Tableau lets you find outliers, relations and trend easily), creating a story out of it and then effectively communicating it to end consumers. There are many challenges and ways to overcome them. Here is what I do to overcome them and to learn Tableau everyday.

The Art of Communication? WTF! This is a damn software.

A lot of people come to me with the ultimate question that every beginner faces to, "How to learn Tableau?"

And then I say, "By learning how to communicate effectively" This leaves them like, "WTF! This is just a damn software, we can just go and learn it, right?"

Right! And their reaction is quite valid and understandable. Most of people are from computer science background and less from interactive design and other creative fields.

And then I continue, "You can just go and learn the software but that will not really help you to achieve your goals. Tableau is much more than that."

What I did to overcome this challenge is that I bought half a dozen notebooks, the ones without lines like drawing notebooks. And dozen of different colored pens and a set of sketch pens and a box of pencils.