Best of the Tableau Web: Collaboration time

Hello, Tableau community! Welcome to Andy's April round-up of the best content being produced by you, the Tableau community.

Good day, everyone! I’m back with the latest round-up of Tableau blog content. This time, I’m looking at content from April 2020. What did I see? Plenty of posts about collaboration. While many of us around the world are in lockdown, virtual communication has become the norm for everyone—which, if you have time, actually improves the ability to get together with other people and work through ideas together. Kendra Allenspach and Keith Dykstra wrote Neat Lessons Learned from Messy Projects, an honest article about the highs and lows of collaboration. I appreciate their candour because all projects have their challenges. I was particularly impressed by how they shared their feelings and overcame the issues.

Klaus Schulte is a master at collaboration and last month he shared his “Dobble/Spot It” collaboration with Kevin Flerlage. Implementing complex game logic might not be the originally intended use case for Tableau, but it’s a powerful way to show the capabilities of the product, as well as a way to challenge one’s own skills. By the way, if gaming is your thing, this is just the latest in a long list of games made in Tableau. If you fancy a rabbit hole to get lost in, try these others: Minesweeper and Battleship by Josh Milligan, Super Mario by Merlijn Buit, Chess and Snake by Tamas Foldi, and Monopoly by Mark Jackson.

Perhaps working with others isn’t practical for your situation. You can still do collaborative projects by getting involved with some of the many community-run projects. Check out the Tableau Public resources page for a list of ways you can get involved. You can also become a member of the Tableau Foundation Service Corps to collaborate directly with non-profit organizations.

Whichever approach you take, I can guarantee that collaboration will enhance your Tableau skills.

As always, enjoy the list! Follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn as I try and share many of these throughout the month. Also, you can check out which blogs I am following here. If you don’t see yours on the list, you can add it here.