George Washington University Uses Tableau for OLAP Operations and Dashboarding


Tableau has changed the traditional BI and Data Warehousing market for good and made BI accessible to all: no more IT intermediaries! Thank you for the opportunity to introduce this ground-breaking tool in an educational environment. What's the point of teaching traditional BI, when that is no more?

Margherita Bruni teaches Data Warehousing and OLAP at the George Washington University School of Business (click here to see a syllabus). She has used Tableau since 2010 to help provide students with knowledge of techniques, methodologies, and tools used in data warehousing in order to promote a more hands-on experience with Business Intelligence.

Q&A
Can you tell us how you used Tableau in your course?
Tableau was used to perform various simple exercises like: create a report, perform typical OLAP operations (roll up, drill down, pivot, slice, dice); it was also used to create an end to end solutions based off sample data that was provided; the project weight was 33% of the total score and consisted in reproducing complex dashboards via Tableau.

How did you learn how to use Tableau?
Clicking around.

How did you teach Tableau to your students?
I did not teach my students - they learned on their own during in class labs, and through a live guest webinar from Tableau Software.

Why did you select Tableau?
Simplicity and power of use. Tableau has also changed the traditional BI and Data Warehousing market for good and made BI accessible to all: no more IT intermediaries! Thank you for the opportunity to introduce this ground-breaking tool in an educational environment. What's the point of teaching traditional BI, when that is no more?

What type of feedback did you receive from your students?
They loved the opportunity to use a real tool!

Click here to view a course assignment.