# Tableau Desktop Crash Course: Learn the Fundamentals from zero to dashboard

> This is content from just-tim, the data-and-analytics channel by Tim Ngwena (formerly 'Tableau Tim'). Tim has 12+ years of hands-on BI experience and covers Tableau most of all, plus Power BI, Looker, Hex, SQL and data modelling, the analytics industry, and the craft of doing the job — always tool-agnostic and honest about the trade-offs.

- **Author:** Tim Ngwena (just-tim, https://just-tim.com/about)
- **Published:** 2023-01-12
- **Format:** Video · 224 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Data visualisation, Analytics, Tool strategy
- **Tools:** Tableau (accelerators, cloud, data connections, desktop, prep, public, server)
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/tableau-desktop-crash-course-learn-the-fundamentals-and-get-started-from-zero-to-dashboard
- **Watch:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Aj8IlC0IEA

This is my Tableau Desktop crash course, taking you from zero understanding all the way to publishing a dashboard. I cover the licence types, the product family, how Tableau Public and Desktop differ, versions and patches, installation, the interface, finding documentation, and connecting to your first data source.

## Key takeaways

- Tableau Public is a free version of Tableau Desktop with the same building experience — the only real limits are which data sources you can connect to and that you must save your work to Tableau's cloud.
- Licences come in three tiers: Creator (full Desktop and Prep access), Explorer and Viewer (which mostly consume content on Cloud or Server).
- Keep your Tableau Desktop version in lockstep with your organisation's Server or Cloud version, since features built in a newer Desktop won't publish to an older Server — Server now only updates twice a year while still receiving monthly patches.
- When checking documentation, set the version selector on the left to match your version and search within that version, rather than the global search bar which defaults to the latest release.
- The three sample workbooks (like Superstore) are a useful benchmark — if they feel slow on your machine, your whole Tableau experience will be slow.
- Tableau Public can only connect to flat files (Excel, text, JSON, PDF, spatial, statistical) plus Google Drive and web data connectors, whereas Desktop opens up the full server-based connection list.

## Chapters

- 0:00 Crash course introduction
- 2:40 Housekeeping and Tim's background
- 4:07 What is Tableau?
- 5:37 The Tableau product family
- 9:51 Pricing and licence types
- 12:26 Getting Tableau for free
- 15:36 Tableau versions and patches
- 21:02 Installing Tableau Public
- 24:41 The Tableau Public interface
- 29:41 Tableau Desktop and data connections
- 32:02 Accelerators and templates
- 40:15 Finding the right documentation

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/tableau-desktop-crash-course-learn-the-fundamentals-and-get-started-from-zero-to-dashboard

---
just-tim — Data and analytics, with a point of view. · https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HYxRWmaNlJux-X7rNLZyw · https://twitter.com/TableauTim · https://www.linkedin.com/in/timngwena