I can remember vividly the first time I saw anything done in Tableau. I was working as an Energy Analyst for Honeywell (you know, the guys who make thermostats among all else). One of the sessions I went to was on benchmarking our clients’ energy consumption against others from similar buildings. The two engineers leading the presentation showed dashboards that allowed for interaction and digging deeper into the data. It was simply beautiful and very intuitive.

I was what I would say a self-proclaimed Excel guru. I could do things with a spreadsheet that would make my coworkers heads spin. So you can imagine my intrigue about this presentation. I immediately reached out to the engineers to find out how they created these dashboards. It was then that I first learned their secret was Tableau.

Within minutes I downloaded a trial version and started playing around. I watched as many online videos as possible and was quickly creating my own visualizations and dashboards.

I started using Tableau for everything I could imagine. At first, I simply recreated existing reports from Excel. Then I started enhancing them. Then I created new dashboards. Before long, I had convinced my team at Honeywell for the need to have Tableau for all our energy analysts on my team – 9 in total.

I actually went to graduate school in environmental management. I always thought I was going to be able to “save the world” but I was going to do it using data. I thought my passion had been the saving the world part, but I learned that really it had always just been data.

My father taught me data analysis when I was in the 7th grade (yay for being a science fair geek) and I really never looked back. So I guess it was really only a matter of time until I embraced the data side and switched from looking at only environmental data to all kinds of data.

In the summer of 2015 I attended the Orlando Tableau User Group to see what other companies in my area were using Tableau for — and what I ended up finding there was a new job with a great company: DataBrains! I have been a full-time Brainiac since the start of 2016 and I currently consult on a variety of projects across numerous verticals. I am a Tableau Desktop Certified Professional and an Accredited Tableau Desktop trainer.

Above all else, I love sharing my passion for Tableau with others and I try to share knowledge whenever I can. I love deconstructing others dashboards to find out “How did they do that?”.  I aim to find new ways to look at things and discover innovative ways to use Tableau.

My goal with this blog is to both educate others and push myself to expand my Tableau expertise. I hope you enjoy!