Tableau Desktop Specialist case studies
Tableau Desktop Specialist · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The Tableau Desktop Specialist credential is an entry-level certification for analysts, business users, and career-changers who want verifiable evidence that they can work competently in Tableau Desktop. It is aimed at people who already build worksheets and dashboards hands-on and want a structured benchmark for their skills, rather than at deep platform administrators or server architects. The Tableau Desktop Specialist case studies are 5 cases and about 3,532 words.
1The 8% That Isn't in the File
You inherit a packaged workbook that reads an Excel file with three sheets. Orders (48,120 rows: Order ID, Order Date, Customer ID, Product, Sales) is the only fact table.
697 words, about 3 min2Monday's CSV
Every Monday at 06:00 a marketing analyst drops a 210,000-row CSV on a network share, and you refresh a workbook that 14 people use for the weekly stand-up. Four columns matter: Event Date arrives as text in three formats ('2024-03-05', '03/05/2024', '5 Mar 2024'); Spend carries dollar signs and thousands separators and is empty on about 9% of rows; Channel has 14 distinct spellings of what should be 5 channels ('email', 'Email', 'EMAIL ', ' paid search', …); Campaign ID is blank on 30% of rows.
735 words, about 4 min3Percent of Total That Doesn't Add Up
A sales-ops manager builds a text table: Region on Rows, QUARTER(Order Date) on Columns (2024 Q1–Q4), SUM(Sales) on Text, then applies Quick Table Calculation → Percent of Total to the Sales pill. Each region's four cells sum to 100% - but she wants each column to be that region's share of the quarter total, so each column should sum to 100%.
700 words, about 4 min4The Green Pill Problem
An analyst has [Order Date] as a proper Date field. She drags it to Columns and Tableau hands her a continuous green MONTH(Order Date) axis spanning 36 months; the tick labels only print at Jan, Apr, Jul and Oct, so a stakeholder insists "the chart skips months." She switches the pill to Discrete, gets 36 blue column headers - and loses the axis entirely.
671 words, about 3 min5Fifty-Seven Out of Sixty
You publish a dashboard to Tableau Cloud for 60 people. The data comes from an on-premises PostgreSQL behind a firewall, published as a live published data source with embedded credentials.
729 words, about 4 min