How to get your hands on Tableau

Earlier this week I wrote a blog with some advice on how you can find a ‘Tableau job’. It seemed to strike a chord with a number of people and I’m glad it did prove useful to the Tableau community.

What I think is an important follow-up on the topic is to show how you can actually get your hands on Tableau so you can use it wherever and whenever you like.

Maybe you’re lucky enough to have a Professional Edition license for use at work and you can also use that named license on a second or home computer for your own practice. Check out this article by Tableau for details. This is the ideal scenario and gives you all the options for getting more Tableau practice. Use it! Make the most of it!

For everyone else, so those of you who cannot access the full professional edition but want to use Tableau and practice and publish your work, here are some options:

• download the Tableau Public App
  • you can connect to a number of different data sources
  • for Makeover Monday we always publish an Excel version of the data or a different format so users of the Tableau Public App can participate
  • you can publish to your Tableau Public profile and build your portfolio
• buy Tableau Personal Edition
  • in addition to publishing to Tableau Public, you can also save your work locally
• if you’re a student, you can get Tableau for FREE
• if you’re an academic, you can also get Tableau for FREE
• if you’re a non-profit, you can get donations of Tableau Desktop through the Tableau Foundation as well as TechSoup. Thank you to my reader Pamela Ann for pointing out what I missed to include!

There are lots of options. Start with the Tableau Public App, you can’t go wrong there. It’s super easy to setup and you can be vizzing in minutes.

Have fun with it and I look forward to seeing what you create 😉