My name is Kyle Yetter, and Tableau has changed my life.
I’ve always been a numbers person, jumping in to make reports to analyze what our performance is. But after I finished my MBA, many of the jobs I looked at said “Tableau experience preferred.” So when an alumnus from Interworks came to BYU (where I worked) to talk about Tableau, I jumped at the opportunity. I never knew how much that one day would change my career and life. I walked out of that 3-hour workshop with an example workbook in hand, and a number of ideas to implement in our organization. The power of visualizing data vs. poring over 70 page reports became evident while building a viz in the middle of a theater full of accountants. Admittedly, I was more excited to build a new report than pay attention to the meeting content, especially when I found a student who owed $9 million dollars! Ok, so they didn’t actually owe us that much, but we had charged him $9.1 million dollars for a pencil from the university testing center. The amazing thing was, thanks to visualizing it in Tableau, I couldn’t miss it. The range went out to $9M! I may have missed that number in the middle of 70 pages of student receivables. From that point on, I was sold.
I moved from BYU to Ancestry in 2016, where I’m now a Business Analytics Manager, help manage Tableau Server, and run an internal Tableau User Group. I’m a Tableau Desktop Certified Professional, a fairly regular participant in Makeover Monday, and looking forward to doing more Workout Wednesdays in the coming year as we begin using it as a training tool at Ancestry.
At home, I’m a newly widowed dad trying to figure out how to raise three kids without their mom, who finished her battle with cancer in September 2019.
From day one in my Tableau journey, I followed blogs from Andy Kriebel, Cole Knaflic, and Jeff Shaffer, among many others. So now, after nearly 5 years of using Tableau, I’m starting this blog. Hopefully it helps someone in their Tableau journey, even it that’s me.