Coursera: Data Visualization and Communication with Tableau Review

Data Visualization and Communication with Tableau is the third course in Duke University's "Excel to MySQL: Analytic Techniques for Business" specialization offered on Coursera. The 5-week course starts is essentially an introduction to Tableau (weeks 2 and 3) book-ended by some lectures on considerations and best practices for communicating data insights in a business setting (weeks 1 and 4.). The final week is devoted to a peer-reviewed assignment and has no new lecture content. The course provides you with a free temporary license for the desktop version of Tableau. You can get through his course without any background knowledge, although some knowledge of MS Excel will help you appreciate some of the comparisons it makes. Grading is based on 4 weekly quizzes and a peer graded assignment.

Data Visualization has quality lectures that do a good job introducing Tableau in the context of creating visualizations for a business context. The Tableau walkthroughs are easy to follow and give you an appreciation for how much easier it is to make nice visualizations in Tableau than it is in Excel. You same data sets for the entire course, one data set for walkthoughs and one for homework assignments, which provides a nice sense of consistency. Weeks 1 and week 4 raise some useful considerations to keep in mind when preparing for and presenting a data analysis, but the Tableau sections in weeks 2 and 3 are the heart of the course. I would have preferred more content covering ins and outs of Tableau instead of the 2 weeks spent on communication topics, but the mix is probably about right for business-oriented students.

I give Data Visualization and Communication with Tableau 4 out of 5 stars: very good.