Book excerpt: Learn through hands-on exercises covering a variety of topics including data connections, analytics, and dashboards to effectively prepare for the Tableau Desktop Certified Associate exam Key FeaturesPrepare for the Tableau Desktop Certified Associate exam with the help of tips and techniques shared by expertsImplement Tableau’s advanced analytical capabilities such as forecastingDelve into advanced Tableau features and explore best practices for building dashboardsBook Description The Tableau Desktop Certified Associate exam measures your knowledge of Tableau Desktop and your ability to work with data and data visualization techniques. This book will help you to become well-versed in Tableau software and use its business intelligence (BI) features to solve BI and analytics challenges. With the help of this book, you'll explore the authors' success stories and their experience with Tableau. You'll start by understanding the importance of Tableau certification and the different certification exams, along with covering the exam format, Tableau basics, and best practices for preparing data for analysis and visualization. The book builds on your knowledge of advanced Tableau topics such as table calculations for solving problems. You'll learn to effectively visualize geographic data using vector maps. Later, you'll discover the analytics capabilities of Tableau by learning how to use features such as forecasting. Finally, you'll understand how to build and customize dashboards, while ensuring they convey information effectively. Every chapter has examples and tests to reinforce your learning, along with mock tests in the last section. By the end of this book, you'll be able to efficiently prepare for the certification exam with the help of mock tests, detailed explanations, and expert advice from the authors. What you will learnApply Tableau best practices to analyze and visualize dataUse Tableau to visualize geographic data using vector mapsCreate charts to gain productive insights into data and make quality-driven decisionsImplement advanced analytics techniques to identify and forecast key valuesPrepare customized table calculations to compute specific valuesAnswer questions based on the Tableau Desktop Certified Associate exam with the help of mock testsWho this book is for This Tableau certification book is for business analysts, BI professionals, and data analysts who want to become certified Tableau Desktop Associates and solve a range of data science and business intelligence problems using this example-packed guide. Some experience in Tableau Desktop is expected to get the most out of this book.