5 Tips to Pass the Tableau Certified Data Analyst Exam

Many a blog has been written on this already. But as long as a single person out there finds this one instructive, what's the harm in having one more? Considering there are plenty of official resources out there already covering which content to expect in the exam, this blog humbly covers just five tips that I would have given to myself, if I could go back in time:

1) Watch this video series

It doesn't take long and it also covers some helpful general advice for multiple choice style exams on top of the Tableaun specific content. This playlist might just be the densest collection of useful information you can ingest in a very short amount of time.

2) Know these table calculation functions very well

Know what they do and how they differ from each other:
first()
last()
index()
lookup()
rank()    <- especially the different ranking options

3) Don't be afraid of the practical section

This actually turned out to be the easiest part for me that also got me back on track time-wise. Tableau on the virtual machine might be a little unfamiliar, but the tasks are easy and the solution is always just a couple of clicks away.

4) Predict the effects of "compute using " changes

This came up quite a lot. You are presented with a table with actual values and some running calculation (table calculation). The question would then be something like "how would you need to change 'compute using' to achieve ... ?"
As you can't try things out in the multiple choice part of the exam, you need to be able to predict the right setting just from looking at the table.

5) Know how to perform common tasks on the different Tableau products

You might have used Tableau Desktop exclusively, but never seen Tableau Server, or vice versa. This is not the most important section, but I got caught off guard somewhat by the tricky questions expecting you to know the exact order of operations needed to unsubscribe from a Tableau Server dashboard for example.

Author:
Matthias Albert
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