Tableau Interview Preparation

Q. Tell me about your self, your roles and responsibilities and your previous experience and expertise in
Tableau?

A. Sure. Myself <Name> I have over all 8+ (based on your resume) years of experience IT working on
Business Intelligence, oracle Development<based on your resume> and Visualization Tools. I started my
career as a oracle developer<based on your resume> and after couple of projects I started working on
Business Intelligence and Visualization tools especially Tableau. Working on Tableau offered me with
challenging tasks and great thinking. Also I became very passionate working on Visualization tools as
these are very powerful and deliver great insights with the most Advanced features. 

In my previous projects I worked as a Sr Developer and Report Analyst where I have created several
Visualizations, Dashboards and Scorecards for various end user requirements and Senior Management. I
am very good at SQL as well and I have written various complex SQL's and compared the Viz's that I
created against the Database. Also I have worked on the Dashboards overall performance and created
them as per the best practices.

To tell brief about my recent projects, At <recent project client> I was working heavily on Dashbaord
development for some of the complex End user requirements. During the course I directly work with the
business end users and gathered requirements and then code the individual sheets/dashboards as per
the Requirements. At times I face some challenges with the way the requirements are set and I always
come up with Alternatives if the tool is not offering the intended functionality. I was instrumental in
delivering over all 8 to 10 dashboards in very less amount of time.

In my second Project <Second project client name>, I was a Tableau Developer and my role was to work
with end users and gather requirements and create various Dashboards using Tableau. Also here the
data is coming from heterogeneous data sources Oracle and Taradata and I used  Tableau's Data
blending option to blend the data and create the Visualizations. Here I got much exposure for creating
some of out of the box charts using Tableau and satisfy the end user needs .

Apart from these, part of my time was spend on Administering Tableau where I got an opportunity to
install Tableau on a Clustered environment and also migrated Tableau from lower version to higher
version. Also I have created users, groups, projects and sites to set up the organization reporting
structure.

This is in brief about me and if you want me to elaborate on any specific thing, I would be more than
happy to do that.

Q. What are some of the Complex Dashboards that you developed

Ans: Well, I can explain some of the Complex Dashboards that I have done in my Recent Project <Project
Name>. We have a requirement from the user where the data is coming from multiple sources like
Oracle, Excel Spreadsheets, Flat files (both in CSV and Text). I am supposed to create a Dashboard with
the data from all these Heterogeneous data sources. I have used Tableau Advanced feature of Data
Blending to achieve this. The complex part here is the understanding of data sources and establishing
the relationships between them. There are several keys in these datasources and if I dont blend with the
right key, I get incorrect results. I have analyzed all the tables involved and established right
relationships and blended them perfectly and completed the End User requirement.

Another complex scenario that I came across is the Compliance Dashboard that I created in my Project
(Project Name>. Here I have to create 6 different sheets in single dashboard and I need to set up the
Interactivity between them. Also I have two different datasources that I blended using Tableau. The
Complex part here is that there is a Geo Map that I used in the Dashboard and I have to use this as filter
to filter the remaining charts present in the dashboard. Since the data for these visuals are coming from
different sources, I have to be careful in setting the Actions using the Tableau.

Personal Description #1

Throughout my career I've dived very deep in data. From understanding various complex data marts and
designing the data models to suit the Reporting needs. Involved in prepping data for extraction,
transformation, and load, to target databases and being consumed by a front-end BI tool. My work
experience has been revolving around Tableau quite a bit. I have connected Tableau to several types of
data sets such as SQL Server, Oracle, and Microsoft spreadsheets. My in-depth experience
with tableau has enabled me to have a well rounded skill set in terms of both development and server
administration. I've created several complex tableau dashboards and addressed requirements with out
of the box solutions. At my most recent project in Seagate we were tasked to convert several existing
dashboards into Tableau dashboards. That required me to analyze the back end data and come up with
possible data marts and recommend reshaping. For Tableau dashboards the data has to be flat and
normalized, those were specific recommendations I have made. In addition, I promoted Tableau best
practices at the organization. Some of these best practices included publishing tableau data sources with
schedules, publishing packaged tableau workbooks, and running incremental tableau extracts. 

Personal Description #2

I have an extensive background in business intelligence and data analysis via front end reporting tools.
Over the past 5 years I've gotten a very specific exposure to Tableau and have really seen first hand the
type of benefits it offers to organizations. As a self-service visualization tool I've seen  tableau be able to
tell the story of a company's data assets in a myriad of methods. Depicting data in a visual perspective is
an excellent method for interpretation and future decision making. At my most recent project in Bank of
America we extensively used Tableau to build dashboards very efficiently and to get our application data
consumed. Some issues I faced during this project was regarding reports which had multiple levels of
aggregations and weighted averages. The way I resolved this was by recommending materialized views
so that several calculations would be done at the database level. Then in tableau I would do the
secondary calculations such as doing a week over week growth assessment. Although  Tableau offers
several built-in table calculations I created several customized ones leveraging the lookup() function so
that I could compare current values with a previous set of point value in the past (ie: last week, week 4
weeks ago, week of last year, etc). This involved several intermediary calculated fields and use of
parameters (driven by users, such as selecting compare period).