At the end of this month (April 29-May 1) thousands of attendees will head to San Diego for Tableau Conference 2024. The event, which is also available on Salesforce+, will host more than 200 sessions over three days to help you build your data skills.
Tableau was acquired by Salesforce in 2019 and is an incredibly powerful analytics tool that lets you visualize and interrogate your data. It’s increasingly integrated into the Salesforce platform and gives you a simple way of connecting to external data sources from a wide range of services. Now is a great time to get familiar with Tableau, especially as many Salesforce customers can get full versions of the product for free.
How to Get Your Free Licenses
Salesforce is offering two free Tableau Creator licenses to Enterprise or Unlimited Edition customers. If you are an education institution, charity, or non-profit, this likely includes you! That’s because Salesforce provides free and discounted Enterprise Edition licenses as part of its “The Power of Us” program.
To access these licenses, get in touch with your Account Executive and ask for the free Tableau Creator licenses announced at Dreamforce ‘23. These are labeled as “Creator for Data Cloud” and are bundled up with your free Data Cloud provisioning.
License Types
These free Tableau Creator Licenses are the most complete available – they allow you to:
- Download and use the main Tableau Desktop product.
- Access your own tableau Site to share and publish data and visualizations.
- Use Tableau Prep to automate cleaning, joining, and transforming your data.
- Use Tableau Pulse, the new AI-driven metrics and insights tool.
For smaller organizations not currently using a data vis tool, these alone can dramatically increase your ability to use and interpret your data. If you want to extend access across your organization, you’ll need more licenses. Not everyone needs full access and there are two other types available.
Anyone who wants to be able to see and interact with visualizations hosted on your site will need a Tableau Viewer license. If you want to be able to share a dashboard or embed it within a Salesforce page(see below), viewers will need a Tableau license to see it.
Tableau Explorer licenses fall somewhere between the two. You don’t get access to Tableau Desktop, Tableau Prep, or the ability to publish new data sources, but you can create and edit workbooks and visualizations from existing data.
Initial Set Up of Your Site
Tableau Cloud is an online hosted platform for your data, workflows, and visualizations. Your Tableau Cloud Site is like your Salesforce org – a private space on a shared cloud service. You can configure your site’s branding, security, connections, and a whole range of other settings.
Getting familiar with a completely new navigation structure can take a while, especially if navigating Salesforce has become second nature. The “Explore” button (compass icon) is a good place to start and lets you move between the different data sources, workbooks, and flows you create.
The welcome banner on the Homepage also gives you quick links to the most common tasks you’ll want to perform on the site.
Get Connected to Salesforce
As a Salesforce admin, the first thing you’ll want to do is connect to your Salesforce org. If you click New and then Workbook, you’ll be prompted to choose a data source. On the Connectors tab, you can link directly to Salesforce and pull in the specific objects you want to access records from.
Alternatively, the Accelerators tab lets you choose a pre-built workbook to let you analyze your Salesforce data. There are accelerators for Data Cloud, Sales, Service, and Nonprofit Cloud. They come with sample visualizations built around the relevant data, allowing you to track your donation pipeline or segment your cases and track support performance.
You’ll notice the sheer breadth of connectors available – Amazon, Azure, BigQuery, Snowflake. Not to mention being able to upload or connect to an Excel or CSV file. This gives you a huge range of options to combine external information with Salesforce records.
You can also set up Salesforce as the main authentication source for your site (avoiding the need for new users to create separate credentials). From that same settings menu go to Authentication and “Enable an additional authentication method”. From there, you can choose and connect to your Salesforce org. You may need to install the Tableau connected app. But once set up, you and your users should have a much smoother experience of logging in to Tableau.
The Best Ways to Learn Tableau
Once you’re Site is set up, it’s time to start building. There are a host of resources available to help you get started, and many of them are free:
- Tableau offers their own eLearning platform. This is paid for, though you can sample some of the initial courses for free.
- Trailhead now offers a range of Tableau modules and the first set of hands-on challenges.
- Tableau’s own YouTube channel has case studies, release highlights, and how-to guides.
- Tableau Tim is one of the most active and popular YouTubers in the ecosystem. He has a great set of 10-minute tutorial videos as well as free crash courses on the main tools.
- If you want to take it further Jed Guinto covers the full range of tools available with your Creator license in his popular Udemy course.
Introducing the Datafam
What’s that? A passionate, supportive, some would say near obsessive community of users championing a cloud software product? Sounds familiar, right?
The DataFam is Tableau’s Ohana and is incredibly welcoming to those new to the platform. The online forums provide a great, searchable source of advice and information – the user groups host regular in-person and virtual meetings as well as recordings from earlier events. The Newbie, Tableau Desktop group is a great place to start when you’re first learning to build visualizations and analyze data.
The Datafam also gives you access to a set of community projects that help you try out your skills and get support and feedback from other users; there are projects to suit every taste. Check out #MakeoverMonday where they rework and improve data stories in the news each week or #GamesNightViz for everything – from D&D spells to the best-performing Mario games.
Each of the projects has a hashtag you can use to search Tableau Public, the final main element of the community. It is a free version of the Tableau platform that allows anyone to access and interact with the visualizations published there. It’s a great way to learn from others and see what is possible on the platform.
Summary
The best way to learn Tableau and see its potential is definitely to get hands-on. If you’re not fortunate enough to be heading to San Diego I hope the resources above give you what you need to take your first steps into the DataFam.
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