Tableau Full Course 2025 | Tableau Tutorial For Beginners | Tableau Data Visualization | Simplilearn

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[Music] Hey everyone, welcome to the Tableau full course by simply learn. In today's world, data is everywhere. But insights, that's where the magic happens. And Tableau is a tool that turns complex data sets into powerful interactive visuals that tell a story. Businesses today rely on datadriven decisions more than ever and Tableau has become the go-to platform for transforming raw numbers into clear actionable insights. So whether in sales trends, marketing analytics or executive dashboards, Tableau make it visual, fast and intuitive. In this full course, you will master Tableau from the ground up, learning how to clean data, build dashboards, apply calculations to create advanced visualizations, and share insights that drive strategy. And here's the exciting part. Data visualization is one of the most in demand skills. Companies across the industries are looking for professionals who can turn data into stories that inspire action. By the end of this course, you won't just know Tableau, you will be the one transforming data chaos into business clarity. So, if you're ready to level up your data game, hit that like, subscribe, and let's get started with our Tableau full course. Before we begin, if you are interested in growing your career in business analytics, this course is a great way to start. The professional certificate in data analytics and generative AI by SimplyLearn is the right choice for you. This is an eight-month live and interactive online program from Porto University online and Microsoft. This program helps you master key in- demand skills along with exclusive hackathons and ask me anything sessions by IBM. Live sessions on the latest AI trends such as generative AI, prompt engineering, explainable AI and more. This postgraduate program adds a momental credibility to your profile by earning certificates from Purdu and Microsoft. You will get career support including resume help, mock interviews and job assistant. And in just eight months, you will master data analysis, data ethics, ETL, SQL along with 11 plus skills. So whether you're switching careers or upskilling, this course gives you the latest data analytics with AI knowledge and practical experience to stay ahead. So guys, what are you waiting for? Hurry up and enroll now. You can find the course link below. So without any further ado, let's get started. It is no surprise that business analytics and business intelligence are two of the fastest growing markets in the world. Organizations today are generating data at a rapid rate. There is a need to use this business data and make smarter decisions. Companies are looking for methods and tools to turn business data into actionable insights. This is where business analytics and intelligence can help play a critical role. Business analytics is the process of collecting, analyzing and drawing valuable conclusions from vast volumes of data available. It helps to improve business performance through fact-based decision making. On the other hand, business intelligence or BI is a technology that enables data preparation, data mining, data management, and data visualization. It allows you to analyze data with queries and create reports and dashboards with the help of charts and graphs to be used by business leaders. Business analytics and business intelligence together create capabilities for companies to compete in the market effectively. Consider this example. Suppose you sell homemade chocolates through an online store. Business intelligence provides meaningful insights into the past and current state of your business. BI tells you that sales of your milk chocolate have spiked up in Texas the past 2 weeks. So, you decide to manufacture more milk chocolates to keep up with demand. Business analytics asks, "Why did sales of milk chocolate spike up in Texas?" By scrutinizing your website data, you learned that most traffic has come from a post by a food blogger based in Texas who liked to amaze chocolate. This insight helps you decide to send complimentary chocolates to a few other well-known food bloggers throughout the United States. Using cuttingedge business analytics and intelligence tools such as Microsoft Excel, SQL, PowerBI and Tableau can enhance customer experience, improve efficiency, conduct competitor analysis, and accelerate growth. With this basic knowledge of business analytics and business intelligence, let's look at the topics we'll be covering in this video. We will start with learning the need for business analytics and the responsibilities of a business analyst. Then we will look at the top business analytics skills and learn about business analytics and intelligence with Microsoft Excel. After that we will see the basics of business intelligence and get an idea about agile and scrum methodologies. Next we will learn to create reports and dashboards in Microsoft Excel and understand in detail how to visualize data with top business intelligence tools such as PowerBI and Tableau. Let's get started. We will understand the importance of business analyst with a short and interesting story. So meet Rob. He runs a cafe in a small town far away. His cafe is one of the oldest and most popular eries in town. Rob's cafe was hugely popular amongst customers and it was doing very well until the onset of the deadly corona virus. Due to COVID 19, like other eeries, Rob was forced to shut down his cafe too. This took a heavy toll on his business and subsequently he lost his customers. None of his customers visited his cafe and this resulted in a huge loss for him. He knew he couldn't afford to close his business forever as it would take time for corona virus to be eradicated. But he was lost. This situation was new to him and he didn't know how to reopen his business amidst this pandemic. After a lot of brainstorming, he recollected reading about business analysts. He remembered that business analysts are professionals who enable a change in an organization. He felt like a business analyst could help him sort out his current business problems. Hence, without wasting any time, he set out to hire a business analyst. He hired Ted, the business analyst, to help him with his ongoing business problems. Rob entrusted Ted with reopening the business. The first step Ted took was to have a discussion with Rob and understand the business problems and the objectives. That is ideally the first step a business analyst would take. On discussing with Rob, Ted learned that the business objective was to reopen the business and get at least 80% of the customer base back. In addition to that, Rob also wanted Ted to look for sustainable ways to reopen and continue the business in the long run amidst the pandemic. Ted studied the case and he came up with a few suggestions that he thought was fit for Rob's business. His first suggestion was to develop an exclusive home delivery app for Rob's cafe. This way, Ted knew that business will improve as customers prefer home delivery in the current scenario. Next, Ted suggested that Rob has work from home meal boxes added to his menu. Many professionals are working from home currently, and having work from home meal boxes would be a good pick for such professionals in the middle of a busy day. Ted's third suggestion was to bring down the selling cost by providing discount coupons that can be utilized by customers. Having a discount will enable more customers to order from Rob's Cafe. Of course, it was not possible to get the customer base back without any sort of price cuts in the current situation. Finally, Ted suggested that Rob's staff would facilitate home delivery orders. This way, he didn't have to lay off his staff and at the same time get the home delivery running. So, these were a few suggestions given by Ted. Yes, depending on the situation, business analysts can take up different approaches. So after the suggestions were accepted by Rob for the app, Ted began to make sure that the development went well by collaborating with the IT team. Ted became the intermediary between the IT team and Rob. He provided suggestions to the team, checked the app through user interface testing and made sure that the requirements met well. The same applied to the other business requirements and changes as well. Ted held regular meetings to gauge the progress and also kept Rob in the loop and updated him with the status of the project. Attending regular catch-ups helped Rob gain an insight into the progress and give his feedback from time to time. Ted made sure that the entire case was well documented. By doing so, he could always refer to the documents in the future with similar cases as well. Ted made presentations that showed Rob the business growth after implementing the changes and Ted always supported his presentations with data. Rob was very impressed with Ted's business approach. Such an approach not only helped Rob reopen his business amidst the COVID 19 but also helped him get 80% of his customer base back. Ted successfully brought about a positive change in Rob's business which was highly beneficial. So that is how Ted the business analyst helped Rob make a business sustainable. This was the importance of having a business analyst in Rob's organization. Don't you think every organization should have a business analyst? Well, yes. Depending on the business domain and the situation, the roles and responsibilities may vary. >> Let's start off and have a look at a day in the life of a business analyst through a small story. So, meet Angela, who is working as a business analyst in an application development firm. Her firm builds applications for clients depending on their requirements. Our next character is Rob. He is a budding entrepreneur with a vision of setting up his own e-commerce app. He plans on selling several electronic gadgets like phones, laptops, cameras, etc. on his app. So, what is Rob's first step? Well, he approaches Angela's firm one day with the vision of creating his e-commerce app. Angela and Rob start talking business and Angela promises to help Rob with his app creation. She assures him that she will look into his business requirements and coordinate with him to get the app running. Rob is happy about it and agrees to cooperate with Angela regarding all the business requirements from his end. Angela as we know is the business analyst. She starts planning Rob's project and without any delay she embarks on this project's journey. She has a set of planned steps that will help her fulfill Rob's requirements. But what are the steps she takes? Is her approach going to be effective and quick? Let's find out the answers to these questions now. Up next, you can learn about Angela's approach that helps her deliver Rob's project smoothly and without any hassles. These steps that we are going to look at are the typical roles and responsibilities of a business analyst. Here we will understand these roles better with respect to Angela's and Rob's story. First and foremost, Angela understands Rob's business objectives, problems, and requirements. Without understanding this, do you think Angela will be able to proceed? No. Hence, a business analyst like Angela understands the problems related to Rob's business and comes up with the right solution to achieve the goals of the business. She brainstorms around what is best suited for an e-commerce app focusing on electronic gadgets. In the next step, Angela gathers all the necessary requirements. Here, she understands Rob's requirements and makes sure that they are on the same page regarding the project and its goals. Both of them together arrive at a stipulated deadline for the project completion. She gathers relevant information based on security of the app, the payment setup based to login, cost of the products and style to name a few. Once Angela has an in-depth understanding of Rob's project and gathers all the necessary requirements, she starts allocating resources by keeping in mind the budget of the project. Here she recognizes and allocates tasks and resources to the development team. PAS work closely with the development team to design the solution for a problem. Angela ensures that the development team doesn't spend their time understanding Rob's requirements. In this step, along with the development team, she finalizes the software and tools required to build the project. Angela doesn't rest until the project is delivered to Rob. She continuously monitors the progress and constantly provides her feedback to the development team with respect to the app's layout, design, and other features. She gives them suggestions in order to improve the application. In the next step, Angela collects feedback of the prototype version of the app from the users. She notes down if the prototype is fine or if it requires more work. PAS validate if the project is running fine with the help of use acceptance testing. They verify if the solution being worked on is in line with the requirements and ensure that the final product satisfies the use expectations. BAS also assess the functional and non-functional requirements. After collecting feedback, Angela moves to one of her most crucial duties and that is building reports. Data visualization is a key skill for any BA. In order to gauge the performance of the app and get valuable insights from it, Angela builds reports using various data visualization tools like Tableau, PowerBI, and Click View. Reports can be general reports such as detailed reports or it can be dashboard reports such as visualized reports with multi-dimensional analysis based on display of business indicators. It is not uncommon for issues to crop up amidst this entire process. Hence, Angela conducts regular meetings with the development team and Rob to solve problems quickly. Having these meetings will help Rob understand the status of the project and it will also help the teams proceed in the right path. Throughout this project phase, Angela makes sure to maintain transparency. On completion of the project, Angela documents and presents the project findings to Rob. Generally, business analyst present the project outcomes to the stakeholders and clients along with maintenance reports. Angela notes down all the project learnings and details in a concise manner. This will help her take better decisions in the future and these documents will save her time while implementing the next project. Now that she has completed all her duties and responsibilities with respect to Rob's project, she is ready to deliver the final e-commerce application to Rob for use. Rob is rest assured that the application developed by Angela's firm is apt for his business and just what he wanted. Angela's streamlined approach made it easier for the project to be delivered within the stipulated time period. Rob is happy and I'm sure he will come back to Angela's firm for projects in the future. So those responsibilities that we saw Angela carry out are ideally the roles and responsibilities for any business analyst out there. Yes, some may vary depending on the company you work for and the project you're working on. Business analyst is a professional who is responsible for bridging the gap between IT and business teams. They use analytics to evaluate processes, determine requirements, deliver datadriven solutions and generate reports to executives and stakeholders. Business analyst is an individual who is a part of the business operation and works closely with the technology team to improve the quality of the services being delivered. They also help in assisting in integration and testing of new solutions. Growing a career in a field with high demand such as business analysis could be a challenge and competition for business analyst positions can be intense. So you should have a clear understanding of the roles and responsibilities of a business analyst. A BA should successfully identify and recognize the organization's business objective. They should understand the business problems and think of a lucrative business solution. They need to understand and collect the business requirements from clients and stakeholders. Allocate the right resources and improve the existing business. Documentation of business findings is another important key role of a business analyst. BAS interact with the development team to design the solution for solving a particular problem. They often need to spend a certain amount of time in meetings in order to save the development team from spending their time in understanding the stakeholders requirement. They often give feedback on the layout of a software application as to what all features need to be added and what functionalities should the application contain and also implement the newly designed features that a business needs. While BAS identify the needs, define the features, write use cases, uncover business rules and manage issues, they should also gauge the functional and non-functional requirements in a business. Business analysts run meeting with stakeholders and other authorities. Hence, discussing issues with the client face to face can do wonders and even help in solving problems quickly. They engage with business leaders and users to understand how datadriven changes to products, services, software, and hardware can improve efficiency and add value. They verify and validate if the project is running well with the help of user acceptance testing and the solutions are in line with the client's requirements. They also ensure that the product delivered satisfies the user requirements. Finally, BAS write documentations and build visualizations to explain all the findings and draw business insights. They also deliver maintenance reports. They need to develop informative, coherent and usable documents for the success of a project. Business analyst skills are a combination of technical as well as nontechnical skills often referred to as soft skills. The skills for a business analyst are not only acquired through training but through experience and combined with the ability to understand situations and the motive behind the problem. So let's have a look at the top skills to become a successful business analyst. The first skill we have is understanding the business objective. For a business analyst, it is important to know the goals and objectives of the business. It is advised that business analyst should have a good knowledge of the business operations in his or her organization. A business analyst should understand the problems related to the business and come up with the right solution. Business analyst should resolve the problems that have been identified and not avoid them. They work on individual actions and tasks that will build towards the achievement of the goals of the business. Objectives of the business can be to expand customer base in order to increase sales, scale up production so that it is in line with the revenue growth, improve revenue streams through increasing perceived product value or increasing marketing budget according to the revenue. Business analysts should have the natural curiosity and determination to continue learning and figuring out how things fit together. Even as business analysts become managers, it is important to stay in touch with the industry and its changes. The next important skill a business analyst should have is analytical and critical thinking. Now there is a famous quote by Thomas Elva edition which says 5% of the people think 10% of the people think they think and the other 85% would rather die than think. Business analysts are paid to think. A business analyst would be able to analyze and interpret the client's requirements clearly. Business analysts require good focus in order to collect and understand the needs of the client. Critical thinking involves evaluating several options before arriving at the desired solution. In certain situations, a stakeholder may give a requirement that's not necessarily tied up to any business value, but rather to their own increased convenience. Applying critical thinking demands not taking all the statements of the stakeholders for granted. Critical thinking allows the business analyst to distinguish between requirements that add value to the business and those that should be given a low priority. A business analyst must be creative in order to reach stated goals where resources are limited and the conditions are non ideal. The third important skill for a business analyst is communication and interpersonal skills. Understanding and being properly understood is key to any profession. If you're unable to clearly specify and communicate requirements to any stakeholder, then you may not fully understand the requirements yourself. Being a business analyst is like being multilingual. You have to speak several different languages while conveying the same message. Business analysts apply communication skills at every point. They use communication and interpersonal skills when the project is launched, while gathering requirements, when collaborating with stakeholders, and also while validating the final solution. Listening, reading and writing skills are very critical for a business analyst. They should be capable of facilitating meetings. Business analysts use verbal and written communication to convey ideas, concepts, facts, and opinions to a variety of stakeholders. Non-verbal communication skills enable the effective sending and receiving of messages, but not limited to body movement, posture, facial expressions, gestures, and eye contact. Effective listening allows the business analyst to accurately understand information that is being communicated verbally. Fourth in our list of skills, we have negotiation and costbenefit analysis. Being a successful business analyst requires working with and interacting with many people. These people include clients, business leaders, project team members, project stakeholders, vendors, private sector representatives, industry leaders, and so forth. Business analysts negotiate at every turn during the course of a project. At the initial stage of a project, negotiation skills are used to determine what should be included in the vision of the project. As details emerge, negotiation skills are used by all parties involved to determine which requests become requirements and which requirements have higher priority. As the project progresses, negotiation skills help to determine the functional design which fulfill the requirements. Technical decisions also require negotiation skills. Business analysts also perform costbenefit analysis to conduct an assessment of the benefits and costs anticipated in a project. When organizations undertake new projects, it is advisable for business analysts that they use costbenefit analysis to establish whether such projects should be embarked or not. Business analysts should be able to achieve a profitable outcome for your company while finding a solution for the client that makes them happy. This balancing act demands the ability to influence a mutual solution and maintain professional relationship. Up next, we have our fifth skill that is decision making. The quality of decisions made by business analyst is what matters a lot because it has a direct impact on the company's business. Thus, it is important for every business analyst to think from all aspects before presenting their decision or strategy. They must be having good problem solving skills as well. Business analyst should have an act to think out of the box and find a solution to problems. Majorly a business analyst follows five major steps while making a decision. These steps are define the problem, find and define the alternative approaches, evaluate the alternative approaches, make the decision based on these approaches and test and finally implement the solution. While some may argue that the technical team is responsible for designing the solution, the business analyst still remains instrumental in ensuring that the design conforms to the requirements that have been approved. Now that we have reached halfway through the skills, I would like to ask all our viewers to please subscribe to our channel and hit the bell icon to never miss an update from Simply Learn. Moving on, we have another really important business analyst skill that is idea about programming languages. Business analysts should have a good hands-on programming knowledge for performing better and faster analysis of data. Knowledge of R and Python is highly beneficial. Business analysts can help solve complex problems by writing efficient codes. Both R and Python have a vast collection of libraries and packages for data manipulation, data wrangling, data visualization and data analytics. Some of these libraries are numpy, pandas, dlier, tidier, ggplot and mattplot lib. In addition to these, it is good to understand statistical software like SAS and SPSS. Using these programming languages such as Python, R and SAS, you can analyze and visualize large data sets as well as create machine learning models for making future business predictions. The seventh skill in our list is creation of reports and dashboards. A business analyst should be proficient in using various business intelligence tools for creating reports and dashboards. Reports created by business analysts can be general reports such as detail report, grouped report, cross tab report, column report, query report, data entry report etc. Or it can be dashboard reports such as visualized report with multi-dimensional analysis based on display of business indicators. Dashboard reports are developed by business analysts to solve business decision-making problems. Different from the tabular interface of the general report, the dashboard report adopts the canvas-like operation interface. Knowledge of Tableau, PowerBI, and click view are required to make different types of reports depending on the business requirements. Now, the eighth skill in our list of skills is database and SQL. Business analysts often work with data that is structured in nature. Hence to store and process this data they should have knowledge of relational databases such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle database, MySQL database as well as NoSQL databases. Also having hands-on experience with SQL is a must for a business analyst to access, retrieve, manipulate and analyze data. So they should be able to write data definition and data manipulation commands such as create, update, delete and insert. Microsoft Excel is the ninth skill in our list. Excel is one of the oldest and most popular and powerful analytics and reporting tool used in the industries for working with data. Business analysts use Excel to perform various calculations, budget analysis and data analysis to derive meaningful insights and take decisions. They sort, filter, and create pivot tables to summarize the data. Business analysts can also create different charts and graphs using Excel to generate dynamic reports related to a business problem. Business analysts can use Excel to create revenue growth models for new products based on new customer forecasts. When planning an editorial calendar for a website, business analysts can list out dates and topics in a spreadsheet. When creating a budget for a small product, they can list expense categories in a spreadsheet. update it monthly and create a chart to show how close the product is to budget across each category. Business analysts can calculate customer discounts based on monthly purchase volume by product. They can even summarize customer revenue by product to find areas where to build strong customer relationships. And finally, in the list of skills, we have documentation and presentation. You could have all the industry experience in the world, but if it's paired with poor business analyst practices, you could be more of a risk to the organization than a business analyst with no industry experience at all. A business analyst must be able to document their project learnings and results in a concise and compact form. They should also be confident about presenting their findings and conclusions in front of the stakeholders and clients. Organized documentation will help you communicate technical concepts to nontechnical employees. It is important that a business analyst notes down all the details that they learn from their projects. This will help them take better decisions in the future. Also, if similar problems arise at a later stage, they can implement the same solution, thereby saving a lot of time and unwanted problems. While business analysts are generally not responsible for making decisions regarding project solutions, decision-m skills are still important for understanding, gathering, and presenting relevant information to assist decision makers with selecting the optimal solution. With that, we have covered our top skills for a business analyst. If you have any questions related to the skills that we covered, then please put it in the chat section. Our team will help you solve your queries. Now let me tell you how simple can help you grow your career in business analytics and help you become a business analyst. So let me search for SimplyLearn here. This is the SimplyLearn website and on the search bar let me look for business analyst. You can see there are a few courses related to business analyst. So let me open these two courses. So let's go to the first course. So this is the business analyst masters program. Now this program is endorsed education provider is IIBA. Now if you look on the right we have the different courses that will be covered as part of this mast's program. So there is introduction to business analysis, certified business analytics professional. You'll also learn about agile and scrum. There's business analytics with Excel. You'll also get training in SQL. There's Tableau training. And you'll also get to work on business analyst caption projects. If I scroll down now, here are the tools that will be covered as part of this course. So there's Microsoft Excel, Zetira, Tableau, PowerBI, Postgres, SQL. Then there's Plan Box, Target Process and others. Here you can see the program advisor. And if I scroll further, this the entire course content we have. These are the different courses that you will be learning in this course. And after you finish the course, you will receive a certificate which will look similar to this. So please go ahead and enroll to this course if you want to start your career in business analytics. Now let me take you to another program. We have post-graduate program in business analysis. Now this is in partnership with Purdue University and endorsed education provider is IIPA. If I scroll down you can see here the key features of this course. You'll get Purdue post-graduate program certification, alumini association membership, master classes from Purdue faculties, enrollment in simply learns job assist. There's 170 plus hours of blended learning, 11 plus hands-on projects, custom projects in three domains. If I scroll further on the right, you can see this is the produce certification that you will receive after finishing the course. And you will also get the certificate received by International Institute of Business Analysis that is IIBA. Let's scroll down. You also have the advantage for enrolling to simply learn job assist program. So you will get IM jobs pro membership for 6 months. Rumé assistance and career monitoring. You'll also have interview preparation and career affairs. Now here you can see the program details. So you will learn about an introduction to business analysis, certified business analysis professional, the agile and scrum, business analytics with Excel, Tableau training, business analyst capstone project and you also have the opportunity to enroll for some electives. So we have Purdue University business analysis masterass. You can also enroll to a PowerBI course and there's agile and scrum foundation. If I scroll down here, you can see the skills that will be covered as part of this program. So there's business analysis, there's alicitation and collaboration, requirement analysis, planning and monitoring. Let me click on view more. You have strategy analysis, dashboarding, wireframing, that's data visualization, statistical analysis using Excel, SQL database, there's requirement life cycle management, and lots more. So these are the tools that will be covered in this course. We have Microsoft Excel, Zera, Fogbars, Planbox, that's Rally, PowerBI, Process SQL, that's version one, target process and others. And now this is the important part. These are the industry related projects that you will get to work on once you enroll to this course. So the first project is canteen ordering system for uni liver. We also have library management system for Stanford University. There's WhatsApp pay and you can see the description of these projects mentioned below and you also have hospital management system for Mayo Clinic. There are course advisor for this course. Now they are directly related to Purdue University. If I scroll further, this is the learner's profile and how the industry trend has been for business analysts. So, please go ahead and enroll to this program if you really want to start your career or you want to grow your career as a business analyst. >> Now, here is a quick road map that depicts what a fresher needs to possess to become a business analyst. First, they need to have a graduation degree in a related field. Then knowledge of SQL and relational database is very important. Thirdly, a fresher should have good hands-on experience with programming languages and that's a prerequisite. And finally, they need to have good communication skills to nail the role of a business analyst. Up next, we have the road map that depicts what an experienced professional needs to possess to become a business analyst. Firstly, they should have good knowledge of the domain they're currently working in. Next, they should know how to write SQL queries and experienced professionals should be good with programming languages. In addition to that, they need to have good communication and negotiation skills. Finally, they should be good at creating interactive reports using business intelligence tools. In addition to that, having a certification offered by International Institute of Business Analysis such as certified business analysis professional would be highly beneficial. are a combination of technical as well as nontechnical skills often referred to as soft skills. The skills for a business analyst are not only acquired through training but through experience and combined with the ability to understand situations and the motive behind the problem. So let's have a look at the top skills to become a successful business analyst. >> The first skill we have is understanding the business objective. For a business analyst, it is important to know the goals and objectives of the business. It is advised that business analysts should have a good knowledge of the business operations in his or her organization. A business analyst should understand the problems related to the business and come up with the right solution. Business analyst should resolve the problems that have been identified and not avoid them. They work on individual actions and tasks that will build towards the achievement of the goals of the business. Objectives of the business can be to expand customer base in order to increase sales, scale up production so that it is in line with the revenue growth, improve revenue streams through increasing perceived product value or increasing marketing budget according to the revenue. Business analysts should have the natural curiosity and determination to continue learning and figuring out how things fit together. Even as business analysts become managers, it is important to stay in touch with the industry and its changes. The next important skill a business analyst should have is analytical and critical thinking. Now there is a famous quote by Thomas Elva edition which says 5% of the people think 10% of the people think they think and the other 85% would rather die than think. Business analysts are paid to think. A business analyst would be able to analyze and interpret the client's requirements clearly. Business analysts require good focus in order to collect and understand the needs of the client. Critical thinking involves evaluating several options before arriving at the desired solution. In certain situations, a stakeholder may give a requirement that's not necessarily tied up to any business value, but rather to their own increased convenience. Applying critical thinking demands not taking all the statements of the stakeholders for granted. Critical thinking allows the business analyst to distinguish between requirements that add value to the business and those that should be given a low priority. A business analyst must be creative in order to reach stated goals where resources are limited and the conditions are non ideal. The third important skill for a business analyst is communication and interpersonal skills. Understanding and being properly understood is key to any profession. If you are unable to clearly specify and communicate requirements to any stakeholder, then you may not fully understand the requirements yourself. Being a business analyst is like being multilingual. You have to speak several different languages while conveying the same message. Business analysts apply communication skills at every point. They use communication and interpersonal skills when the project is launched, while gathering requirements, when collaborating with stakeholders, and also while validating the final solution. Listening, reading and writing skills are very critical for a business analyst. They should be capable of facilitating meetings. Business analysts use verbal and written communication to convey ideas, concepts, facts, and opinions to a variety of stakeholders. Non-verbal communication skills enable the effective sending and receiving of messages, but not limited to body movement, posture, facial expressions, gestures, and eye contact. Effective listening allows the business analyst to accurately understand information that is being communicated verbally. Fourth in our list of skills, we have negotiation and costbenefit analysis. Being a successful business analyst requires working with and interacting with many people. These people include clients, business leaders, project team members, project stakeholders, vendors, private sector representatives, industry leaders, and so forth. Business analysts negotiate at every turn during the course of a project. At the initial stage of a project, negotiation skills are used to determine what should be included in the vision of the project. As details emerge, negotiation skills are used by all parties involved to determine which requests become requirements and which requirements have higher priority. As the project progresses, negotiation skills help to determine the functional design which fulfill the requirements. Technical decisions also require negotiation skills. Business analysts also perform costbenefit analysis to conduct an assessment of the benefits and costs anticipated in a project. When organizations undertake new projects, it is advisable for business analysts that they use costbenefit analysis to establish whether such projects should be embarked or not. Business analysts should be able to achieve a profitable outcome for your company while finding a solution for the client that makes them happy. This balancing act demands the ability to influence a mutual solution and maintain professional relationship. Up next, we have our fifth skill that is decision making. The quality of decisions made by business analyst is what matters a lot because it has a direct impact on the company's business. Thus, it is important for every business analyst to think from all aspects before presenting their decision or strategy. They must be having good problem solving skills as well. Business analyst should have an act to think out of the box and find a solution to problems. Majorly a business analyst follows five major steps while making a decision. These steps are define the problem, find and define the alternative approaches, evaluate the alternative approaches, make the decision based on these approaches and test and finally implement the solution. While some may argue that the technical team is responsible for designing the solution, the business analyst still remains instrumental in ensuring that the design conforms to the requirements that have been approved. Now that we have reached halfway through the skills, I would like to ask all our viewers to please subscribe to our channel and hit the bell icon to never miss an update from Simply Learn. Moving on, we have another really important business analyst skill that is idea about programming languages. Business analysts should have a good hands-on programming knowledge for performing better and faster analysis of data. Knowledge of R and Python is highly beneficial. Business analysts can help solve complex problems by writing efficient codes. Both R and Python have a vast collection of libraries and packages for data manipulation, data wrangling, data visualization, and data analytics. Some of these libraries are numpy, pandas, dlier, tidier, plot and in addition to these, it is good to understand statistical software like using these programming languages such as Python, R and SAS, you can analyze and visualize large data sets as well as create machine learning models for making future business predictions. The seventh skill in our list is creation of reports and dashboards. A business analyst should be proficient in using various business intelligence tools for creating reports and dashboards. Reports created by business analysts can be general reports such as detail report, grouped report, cross tab report, column report, query report, data entry report etc. Or it can be dashboard report such as visualized report with multi-dimensional analysis based on display of business indicators. Dashboard reports are developed by business analyst to solve business decision-making problems. Different from the tabular interface of the general report, the dashboard report adopts the canvas-like operation interface. Knowledge of Tableau, PowerBI, and click view are required to make different types of reports depending on the business requirements. Now, the eighth skill in our list of skills is database and SQL. Business analysts often work with data that is structured in nature. Hence to store and process this data they should have knowledge of relational databases such as Microsoft SQL server, Oracle database, MySQL database as well as NoSQL databases. Also having hands-on experience with SQL is a must for a business analyst to access, retrieve, manipulate and analyze data. So they should be able to write data definition and data manipulation commands such as create, update, delete and insert. Microsoft Excel is the ninth skill in our list. Excel is one of the oldest and most popular and powerful analytics and reporting tool used in the industries for working with data. Business analysts use Excel to perform various calculations, budget analysis and data analysis to derive meaningful insights and take decisions. They sort, filter, and create pivot tables to summarize the data. Business analysts can also create different charts and graphs using Excel to generate dynamic reports related to a business problem. Business analysts can use Excel to create revenue growth models for new products based on new customer forecasts. When planning an editorial calendar for a website, business analysts can list out dates and topics in a spreadsheet. When creating a budget for a small product, they can list expense categories in a spreadsheet. update it monthly and create a chart to show how close the product is to budget across each category. Business analysts can calculate customer discounts based on monthly purchase volume by product. They can even summarize customer revenue by product to find areas where to build strong customer relationships. And finally, in the list of skills, we have documentation and presentation. You could have all the industry experience in the world, but if it's paired with poor business analyst practices, you could be more of a risk to the organization than a business analyst with no industry experience at all. A business analyst must be able to document their project learnings and results in a concise and compact form. They should also be confident about presenting their findings and conclusions in front of the stakeholders and clients. Organized documentation will help you communicate technical concepts to nontechnical employees. It is important that a business analyst notes down all the details that they learn from their projects. This will help them take better decisions in the future. Also, if similar problems arise at a later stage, they can implement the same solution, thereby saving a lot of time and unwanted problems. While business analysts are generally not responsible for making decisions regarding project solutions, decision-m skills are still important for understanding, gathering and presenting relevant information to assist decision makers with selecting the optimal solution. So what is Tableau? So before we understand what exactly is Tableau, let us imagine a simple situation. Imagine that you're an office worker and you get some loads of data uh maybe like millions of rows or billions of rows and you are supposed to extract the insights of that particular data. So what do you do? You basically load that data into a database and try to write the SQL commands and then try to extract the insights of that particular data. So this kind of approach is basically timeconuming and you get exhausted. Now what if you had a tool which could write all the SQL commands for you in the background and all you had to do is just to drag and drop the data. Sounds interesting, right? So Tableau is just the same. All you have to do is just drag and drop the data and it will automatically write all the SQL commands you ever wanted to write on that particular data and it will give you live data interactions and advices for the future. Now with this let us understand the definition of Tableau. So basically Tableau is a business and analytical software tool developed in America. Tableau helps people to understand, visualize and make datadriven decisions in real time with extreme agility and accuracy. Now with this let us continue with the next topic which will be about the various versions of Tableau. So at first we have the Tableau desktop. So, Tableau Desktop is a data visualization application to facilitate you to examine virtually any kind of structured data and generate highly interactive, beautiful graphs, dashboards, and reports within minutes. Once a quick installation, you can tie to virtually any data source from spreadsheets to data warehouses and display information in several graphic perspectives. Designed to be easy to utilize, you'll be working more rapidly than ever before. Next, we have the Tableau server. It is a business intelligence application that offers browser based analytics anyone can utilize. It is a rapidfire alternative to the slow pace of traditional business intelligence software. It is an online solution meant for sharing, distributing and collaborating on content created in Tableau. What makes Tableau different? It is proposed to everyone. There is no scripting required. So, everyone can grow to be an analytics expert. You can grow your deployment as you require it. Train online for free. Find answers in minutes and not in months. That's the specialtity of Tableau. Now followed by the Tableau server, we have Tableau online. So Tableau online is a business intelligence application that offers browserbased analytics anyone can utilize. As discussed before, it is a rapidfire alternative to slowpaced traditional business intelligence software. So, Tableau online is a secure cloud-based solution for sharing and collaborating on Tableau views and dashboards. Next up, we have the Tableau public. So, now I want to give you guys a serious heads up. If you're a beginner in Tableau, Tableau public is like an open source. Whatever the data you choose to work on using Tableau Public, it goes to public. So, kind of like Tableau public is not preferable if you want to work on your company's sensitive and confidential data. Tableau public is a free software to facilitate anyone to get connected to a spreadsheet or a file and create interactive data visualizations for the web. It is delivered as a service that permits the user to be up to and running overnight. With table public users can construct amazing interactive visuals and publish them quickly without the help of programmers or IT. It is designed for organizations to facilitate their websites with interactive data visualizations. There are higher limits on the size of data you can work with and among other features you can keep your underlying data hidden. And lastly, we have Tableau reader. Tableau reader is a free desktop application that you can use to open and interact with data visualizations built in Tableau Desktop. With Tableau Reader, you can filter, drill down, and discover humongous loads of data. Now moving ahead we have the features of Tableau. So these are the few important features that you might want to consider. Those are the first one robust security. Tableau takes special care of data and user security. It has a foolproof security based authentication and permission systems for data