How to Pass the Tableau Desktop Specialist Certification Exam — 31 Tips and Practice Questions
Updated as per latest exam format.
I recent passed the Tableau Desktop Specialist Certification Exam and wanted to share my journey with the aspiring enthusiasts! I have only been using Tableau for 3 months now and honestly I am surprised slightly. But thanks to the awesome guidance I received in Twitter from the amazing Tableau community. Let me summarize below.
Study Materials and Practice Exams
- Theoretical Study — Tableau Official Help Guide and Tableau Official Video Tutorials
- Practice Datasets — Tableau Official Resources Datasets Collection and MakeOver Monday
- Mock Tests — Tableau Practice Tests and Learn Tableau
My Experience, Tips, and Practice Questions
I purchased the exam for $100 and scheduled it for the coming week through Pearson VUE on a sunny afternoon after finishing my office work. You need to score 75% from 45 multiple-choice questions in 60 minutes to pass this exam. I felt confident enough after my practice for last 10–12 weeks and thought why not give it a try. Anyways I can reschedule it if I felt not ready over the next few days.
But I felt confident till the exam day and appeared for it. To my amazement, I scored 93%. And the exam felt easier than what I had expected. So here’s my top tips for you to pass the exam like I did in a short time frame.
1. Go through the Official Tableau Desktop Specialist Exam Guide
2. For each of the topics in the Guide above, go through the Official Help Guide I mentioned in the resources above. If you are not clear, search online some more and keep reading. Here’s a sample theoretical question.
3. Lots of practice is required in Tableau to answer the hands-on questions during the exam. Else the given time limit will feel too short to complete. Here’s a sample question below.
4. For any help needed, reach out to the social communities of Tableau on Twitter or Reddit, they are very helpful.
5. On the exam day, or even before that day, make sure you are aware and compliant with the Setup Guidelines advised by Tableau. Otherwise it will delay start of your exam when the proctor finds you are not having good connection speed etc.
6. Make sure you have your Government ID ready.
7. The Proctor will ask you to give a 360 degree view of your room to make sure you are alone and you do not have additional books, monitors around you.
8. Ensure all applications are closed in your laptop. The only application that you will be allowed to use is Google Chrome.
9. Using Chrome, you can login to the virtual machine where you will have the datasets and Tableau Desktop available using a link which the Proctor will guide you.
10. You might notice the virtual environment slightly slower than what you are used to work locally. But this will not impact as much during the exam.
11. The format of the exam is as multiple-choice and you have to score 70% from 30 multiple-choice questions in 60 minutes to pass the exam.
12. I am thankful to the guidance I received as all the questions felt achievable for me. I struggled a little with a dashboard analysis but flagged it for later and did it at the end.
13. Coming to flagging questions, it is very helpful not to get stuck at a particular question and finish the ones you are okay with. Then come back to the flagged questions later at the end and attempt them.
14. It is interesting that Tableau has now restricted use of Google and search online for answers during the exam. I would advise to practice enough hands-on with the tool before the exam to be ready to answer the questions.
15. With regards to those of us who have gotten used to the Tableau software and subconsciously do several steps while using the tool, pay attention when preparing for the exam and observe what you do when you use the tool. This will make you conscious of all the small steps you do, as during the exam you will not have access to the tool to verify your answer.
16. Some of the top topics I would advise to get ready on are Dimensions, Measures, Continuous, Discrete, Joins, Blends, Unions, Geographic Data Types, Histogram, Bins, Scatter Plot, Dual Axis Chart, Cohort Analysis, Groups, Sets, Reference Lines, Trend Models, Parameter Actions especially related with a Dashboard, Marks Card Properties, Dashboards and Stories, Order of Operations, Level of Detail Expressions.
17. A sample question which I found especially helpful while practicing is the below one. If you can solve this type of questions it really helps.
18. Often the questions I found cater to multiple questions in the same question. Where we need to identify something first, then find something else with respect to what we found first. Proceed very carefully in these questions to avoid rework or duplicate effort to save time.
19. For the questions that have multiple check-boxes, make sure you select all the correct ones you are sure of. Then for the ones you are not sure, take as much time required to figure them out and then check them.
20. A timer will keep showing you how much time you have left for the exam.
21. The current pattern shows that the datasets in use often cater to variety of current real-life scenarios that we have. So don’t expect the Super Store dataset, instead you can expect a Flight, or Storm, or Hotel dataset for the exams which you have to analyze to derive your answers.
22. I found there are several concepts that require further reading during practicing. These concepts might not be readily available from the Tableau Help Guides, but given the curious nature of my soul, I kept reading more on these topics. Here’s a sample below.
23. One of the common areas of losing points is not being comfortable enough with blending, joins, unions, etc. So it is advisable to practice these functionalities before the exam as there will definitely be some question where you have to handle and process more than one dataset to answer a question.
24. You can easily download Tableau Public for free and practice these types of questions where Union, Blend or Join type activities are required. Here’s a sample question I practiced earlier where you have to combine two datasets to arrive at your answer.
25. Often it happens that after combining the datasets, it is difficult to understand whether we joined them correctly or not. It is even scarier when after solving we do not find the answer in the options provided to us in the multiple-choice selection screen. Do not panic.
26. The first thing to do in such a case where your answer is not in the options is check whether you followed the question correctly. Often it contains a year value, or some filter criterion that it is very easy to overlook, and that changes everything. Revisit the question from the start step by step and you will soon identify the root cause of the discrepancy.
27. The best approach I have found to save time in a clean way is to start off with a clean sheet always. You may or may not want to question number the sheets you did for your prior questions and just use a new sheet in the same workbook. I opened a new workbook for every question and closed the earlier one, just gave me a fresh feeling where no question is related to the other.
28. Though you are not required to write formulas during the exam, it is easy in some cases if you can write a formula and use advanced Table Calculations. They may help you get to the answer faster. But note that the exam focusses on the fact that you can derive all answers just by using the menu, navigation options and functionalities provided by the tool only.
29. Be aware of the terminologies of the various chart types like Pareto Chart, Sunburst Chart, Box and Whisker Chart, Dual Axis Chart, Bubble Chart, Heat Map Chart, etc. The questions may not directly ask you to define a chart, but if those are in the options it will easily help you eliminate the wrong choices. The wrong answers are often put in such a way that they will confuse you and this extra knowledge and reading I found helpful during the exam.
30. When you finish the exam and click Submit, you will be given your success or failure scorecard immediately. Usually within a couple of hours or the same day you will get a full report of your performance in each category of the test and a Certificate attachment if you passed. You do not get a breakdown of question-wise correct or wrong answers, only the category where you need to improve, say for example Sharing Insights.
31. Tableau also provides you with an Acclaim badge for the Tableau Desktop Specialist Certificate which you will need to accept if you want to show it off later for your profile or CV. If you fail in the first attempt, there is no limit to the number of times you can attempt this test. But Tableau recommends to take a couple of weeks to understand what happened and prepare better so that you can learn strategically and do better in your upcoming exam.
Hope you enjoyed reading and keep learning and practicing. All the best for your exam!
