Tableau is definitely a useful tool. Tried getting folks with Tableau skills in previous whoishiring post. The other positions I posted got a lot of response but not the Tableau-oriented ones. Looks like plenty of enthusiasts in this thread through. Where were you all? Hey, in the off chance you are Iinterested in working in Tableau at a think tank (RAND) send me (Chris) a note at dev.hiring@rand.org.
There's a reason for this. Unless you work in an organization that has already implemented Tableau, or is willing to take a punt on using it, then there is just no easy way to get skilled up on it.
It's limited to flat files, so you have to plan ahead on what data you'll explore. In terms of the viz - feature parity, but not quite the same at all if you want to do exploration. Which is too bad, because Tableau's ease of exploration is what makes it so much more valuable than PowerBI or custom d3.
What is it lacking in terms of exploration? I thought most of the exploratory benefits were in the visualizations, unless you mean the ability to ad-hoc connect to random databases and begin exploration (because you have to plan ahead to extract flat files from those sources)
I mean in terms of learning to use the exploratory/dashboarding functionality - it's fairly easy to do that with Tableau Public and public data sources (or your own if you are fine with the saved dashboards being accessible to the public).
