Book Image

Mastering Tableau 2019.1 - Second Edition

By : Marleen Meier, David Baldwin
Book Image

Mastering Tableau 2019.1 - Second Edition

By: Marleen Meier, David Baldwin

Overview of this book

Tableau is one of the leading business intelligence (BI) tools used to solve BI and analytics challenges. With this book, you will master Tableau's features and offerings in various paradigms of the BI domain. This book is also the second edition of the popular Mastering Tableau series, with new features, examples, and updated code. The book covers essential Tableau concepts and its advanced functionalities. Using Tableau Hyper and Tableau Prep, you’ll be able to handle and prepare data easily. You’ll gear up to perform complex joins, spatial joins, union, and data blending tasks using practical examples. Following this, you’ll learn how to perform data densification to make displaying granular data easier. Next, you’ll explore expert-level examples to help you with advanced calculations, mapping, and visual design using various Tableau extensions. With the help of examples, you’ll also learn about improving dashboard performance, connecting Tableau Server, and understanding data visualizations. In the final chapters, you’ll cover advanced use cases such as Self-Service Analytics, Time Series Analytics, and Geo-Spatial Analytics, and learn to connect Tableau to R, Python, and MATLAB. By the end of this book, you’ll have mastered the advanced offerings of Tableau and be able to tackle common and not-so-common challenges faced in the BI domain.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Tableau Concepts, Basics
9
Section 2: Advanced Calculations, Mapping, Visualizations
16
Section 3: Connecting Tableau to R, Python, and Matlab

Connecting to data

When you are familiar with Tableau Desktop, Tableau Prep will be an easy game for you, the handling and interfaces are very similar and connecting to data, if it's a text file, a database or an extract, works all the same! At first sight you might not even notice a difference between the Tableau Prep and the Tableau Desktop GUI, which provides the handy advantage that you can start prepping right away:

Click on the + in order to open a file. The following screen will appear:

From the preceding screenshot, we can see that you can choose the type of data you want to connect to in the search bar. Just as in Tableau, multiple database are in the repertoire of Tableau Preps too.

Exercise: connecting data to Tableau Prep

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