Book Image

Getting Started with Tableau 2018.x

By : Tristan Guillevin
Book Image

Getting Started with Tableau 2018.x

By: Tristan Guillevin

Overview of this book

Tableau is one of the leading business intelligence tools used worldwide, in organizations of every scale. In its latest release, Tableau 2018 promises richer and more useful features related to visual analytics, reporting, dashboarding, and a host of other data visualization aspects. Getting Started with Tableau 2018.x will get you up and running with these features. The book starts with all the new functionalities of the different Tableau 2018 versions, along with concrete examples of how to use them. However, if you're new to Tableau, don't worry! The rest of the book will guide you through each major aspect of Tableau with examples. You'll learn how to connect to data, build a data source, visualize your data, build a dashboard, and share it online. In the final chapters, you'll also learn advanced techniques such as creating a cross-database join, data blending, and more. By the end of the book, you will have a firm understanding of how to effectively use Tableau to create quick, cost-effective, and business-efficient business intelligence solutions.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Catching Up with Tableau 2018
Index

Chapter 4. Connect to Data and Simple Transformations

The first thing you usually do when opening Tableau is to connect to a dataset. You already had a glimpse of data connection in the previous chapter when we used an Excel file. In this chapter, you'll see the most important options that Tableau offers when connecting to data. Here are our main focuses:

  • Data connection
  • Join data easily
  • Union your data
  • Simple transformation

To harmonize all the different words among the various data providers, we'll use the following terms through the chapter:

  • Dataset to represent any sources. It is where your data is located. It could be an Excel file, a database on a server, or a file on the cloud. The dataset is what you want to connect to Tableau.
  • Tables to represent, no matter the connection, a sheet in Excel or a table in a database. For example, there are three tables in the following screenshot:
  • Data Source to represent the result of your connection, after all the transformations.

Let's now start with some...