Tips for applying to the Data School UK: A Tableau Beginner's Guide.

Thinking of applying for the data school but have never used Tableau before? Here are my tips and tricks for your initial viz!

Competitive Analysis identifies and evaluates the business strategies of your competitors, resulting in the analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) for your product relative to the competitors’ in a business ecosystem. Further analysis may provide an insight to your product strategy.

The analysis is often conducted in the early stages of product development. As the dynamics of products in the ecosystem change rapidly, many companies have embraced agile competitive analysis as a part of their product strategy.
Photo by UX Indonesia / Unsplash

Learning Tableau

Initially, the application process might seem daunting; learning tableau from scratch is a big commitment and sounds extremely difficult and time consuming. Luckily tableau is really easy to pick up! The data school offer a range of resources for tableau beginners, so I would suggest looking through them to gain a good foundation to the software! (Here are some great links:  https://public.tableau.com/app/resources/learn

https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/andy.kriebel/viz/VisualVocabulary/VisualVocabulary

Starter Kits Resources
Self-serve Tableau knowledge with these resources.

Use a good data set

It would be useful to chose the topic of your dataset based on something you are interested in. This will motivate you to spend more time on your application and improve your dashboard. Try to choose a relatively simple dataset as this is your first time using tableau.

Planning your viz

It is really important to plan out what you want to create. A useful website is excalidraw (https://excalidraw.com/) which you can use to brainstorm and roughly design your dashboard.

It would also be helpful to look at previous successful applications to give you a rough idea of what your viz should look like (https://www.thedataschool.co.uk/successful). Make sure you don't try and make your viz too complicated, for your first application less is more, especially when its your first time using tableau!

Author:
Keren Aharon
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