How well do you know Tableau? I got a chance to test my skills this week at the Cincinnati Tableau User Group during their Viz Games. “Newbies” were asked to reproduce a dashboard projected on the screen, while “experts” were asked to produce the same dashboard with Automatic Updates turned off for each worksheet.
If you are unsure what that does or means, it basically allows you to place items on the rows, columns and Marks Card, but you get no visual feedback. In practice, you would use this feature to turn off data updates if you were making small changes after you had some sort of visual. Turning it off before you even starts causes you to stare at a blank canvas while you build.
There were 4 charts to build; a map with a diverging color palette, a line chart, and treemap with multiple details and lastly a diverging bar chart.
You aren’t going to be able to get it exactly like the picture displayed because some things you can do, like edit an axis, because the axis isn’t there! I’d say the best case you are going to be at 90-95% if you know your stuff.
If you ever want to test your knowledge, do a blind build with a friend. Have them build a dashboard, then you recreate it with the auto-updates turned off and see how well you know the structure of different chart types!
How’d I do? If I’m self-grading on a scale from 1 to 10, I would have given myself a 9. It was really cool to “press play” and see the dashboard appear.