My Tableau Desktop 10 Qualified Associate Certificate Exam Experience.

Tuesday, July 18, 2017

As of July 17, I have obtained my Tableau Desktop 10 Qualified Associate Certification. Here, I would like to share some of my experience with the examination that I think it would be helpful for future exam takers.

Firstly, exam taking environment is really important. They emphasize it well but it is very crucial. You need to find real quite place with real good internet connection. With Internet connection, even the upload speed is important for them. So try your best to find the perfect place for care free test taking. And be sure you have your only photo ID with you. Also at one point they provide phone numbers for in case of any technical issues, so you need to write those numbers down. But for later, you are only allowed to have your computer and a cup of coffee on the table.

Proctor will run some applications upon installing the first application yourself. S/he will ask to see around the room you are in as well as setting up the environment for your test taking.

You will be provided to with a virtual environment. Here, there are some points that I have not seen anyone mentioned before.

1. The virtual environment provided has US regional settings. So if you have different keyboard layout, you need to know US keyboard layout. For example, I have Turkish Q keyboard and I had set up that, which eventually did not work out. I had problem with the equal sign, then I use the onscreen keyboard to get the sign. So either be prepared or use onscreen keyboard instantly before losing any more time.
2. The other issue is the time of the machine. It also has regional settings, so try using test screen timer to see your remaining time. The windows clock is somehow misleading you.
3. The other point is the shortcuts. I am a guy of shortcuts and the virtual environment quite against it. For example if you use alt+tab to switch windows, it takes you off the virtual environment to your own desktop. So be carefull. Same thing is true for ESC key.
4. My proctor also did not mention about the folder on the desktop of the virtual environment. There are some shortcuts on the desktop, which are Chrome, Tableau Desktop, and a Folder.
   This folder is important because you will be able to find all the Excel Datasources within this folder. The structure of the folder is as if in Certification type (Delta/Server/Desktop) and then the language options. You need to go like 3 or 4 subfolders to reach the destination folder.
   This folder also contains a Tableau Workbook which you need to relate to answer some of the questions. In my case, I only had one question related to this workbook within these folders.
   So be careful with this folder and be aware of its existence.

Also let me a little bit about the questions too. I had 36 questions, about 10 of which are technical questions, I mean the questions you answer directly. Otherwise you will mostly work with Tableau Desktop and many different Excel source files.

Here I highly recommend you to save all the sheets you work for that question and please remember to rename the sheets with question number so that you can revisit easily.

The questions were not so advance like asking LODs or so many calculations. One question requires you to create Set. That one was tricky. Other than that, you basically drag and drop. You barely create calculated fields to work on. So be comfortable.

However, I had one surprising question. I did not expect this at all. The question was about the distance of two locations on the map. I searched on Google at that moment and I saw the related link. But following does steps would cost a lot of time. Instead I just searched on Google to find the distance between two locations by "Crow Fly".

If you are curious how we could have done it with Tableau, here is the link on how-to-do: http://kb.tableau.com/articles/howto/calculate-the-distance-between-points-on-a-map

And here is the link on how I solved the question: http://tjpeiffer.com/crowflies.html

This is basically it, I recommend watching the videos on youtube to get prepared. And I wish you best of luck.

Also, if you have any more questions, please let me know and I will do my best to get back to you as soon as possible. You can find my contact info here.