Udacity: Data Visualization in Tableau Review

Data Visualization in Tableau is a free 3 week course available on Udacity that prepares students for its Predictive Analytics for Business nanodegree program. The course consists of 4 sections: data viz fundamentals, design principles, Tableau basics and storytelling with Tableau. The course has on prerequisites, but you'll need to install Tableau to follow along. There are a handful of comprehension questions after readings and lectures, but there does not appear to be any assignments, quizzes or a course grade.


Course content consists primarily of written guides. There is approximately 17 minutes of video content in the entire course, with over half of that coming from a 9 minute interview with a Tableau developer. The written guides are clear and aesthetically pleasing. Although I usually expect a MOOC to have more lecture content, it turns out that it works well to present information about data visualization as text and visualizations (if done properly.). It helps that Udacity's overhauled platform is easy to navigate and looks better than the old system they had a year or two ago. Toward the end of the course, however, it starts touching on topics like creating dashboards and storyboards that are harder to explain thoroughly with text, so it provides links to tutorial videos made by Tableau.


Data Visualization in Tableau is a fine primer on data visualization and Tableau, with concise written guides that are easy to navigate, but its brevity and lack of assignments means you'll leave without much hands-on experience using Tableau. Also, the fact that it frequently defers to the official Tableau documentation and video tutorials begs the question: would it more efficient to simply learn everything from Tableau itself rather than taking an external MOOC? Either way, you can't go too far wrong since the time commitment for the course is minimal.


I give Data Visualization in Tableau 3.5 out of 5 stars: Good.