Earlier this year, I woke up and said _today will be the day I learn Tableau. _I rolled up my sleeves and went straight into watching the first beginner tutorial I found on Youtube with a catchy title like “How to Learn Tableau in 1 Day.” About 30 minutes later, I found myself disengaged (I shut my laptop shortly after) and at the start of what would be a slow and painful trek towards building my first Tableau dashboard. Turns out, it didn’t take me 1 day to learn Tableau but rather 2 months because I continued to make technical and non-technical mistakes in my learning process.

These are the five biggest mistakes I made while learning Tableau and how you can avoid them to successfully and efficiently master this popular BI tool.

Mistake #1 | Learning Features of Tableau I Didn’t Need

When I queued up my first Tableau YouTube tutorial, I had a tough time recognizing what features of Tableau I should learn first. The problem was also deeper than that — I didn’t really know the issues in my data storytelling. So when I sat through tutorials, **everything **seemed like it could be relevant. It makes sense that I would lose interest or get pulled into new tutorials — I lacked the insight and focus needed to make the learning process feel personal.

While this mistake might be difficult to avoid entirely as a beginner, I suggest taking a moment to think about the issues in your data storytelling that you think Tableau can help solve. These might look something like:

• Making your data presentations more interactive and engaging using dashboards.
• Creating beautiful layered maps, and quickly.
• Strengthening your forecasting visualizations utilizing TabPy.

You’ll want to start by learning features that will speak directly to the issues in your analytical process. Tableau’s features are vast and it might serve you better to understand say, Level of Detail (LOD) Expressions before learning how to use custom Mapbox styles in Tableau.

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