Book Image

Mastering Tableau 2021 - Third Edition

By : Marleen Meier, David Baldwin
Book Image

Mastering Tableau 2021 - Third Edition

By: Marleen Meier, David Baldwin

Overview of this book

Tableau is one of the leading business intelligence (BI) tools that can help you solve data analysis challenges. With this book, you will master Tableau's features and offerings in various paradigms of the BI domain. Updated with fresh topics including Quick Level of Detail expressions, the newest Tableau Server features, Einstein Discovery, and more, this book covers essential Tableau concepts and advanced functionalities. Leveraging Tableau Hyper files and using Prep Builder, you’ll be able to perform data preparation and handling easily. You’ll gear up to perform complex joins, spatial joins, unions, and data blending tasks using practical examples. Next, you’ll learn how to execute data densification and further explore expert-level examples to help you with calculations, mapping, and visual design using Tableau extensions. You’ll also learn about improving dashboard performance, connecting to Tableau Server and understanding data visualization with examples. Finally, you'll cover advanced use cases such as self-service analysis, time series analysis, and geo-spatial analysis, and connect Tableau to Python and R to implement programming functionalities within it. By the end of this Tableau book, you’ll have mastered the advanced offerings of Tableau 2021 and be able to tackle common and advanced challenges in the BI domain.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
16
Another Book You May Enjoy
17
Index

Connecting Tableau to your data

At the time of writing, Tableau's data connection menu includes more than 70 different connection types. And that's somewhat of an understatement since some of those types contain multiple options. For example, Other Files includes 34 options. Of course, we won't cover the details for every connection type, but we will cover the basics.

Upon opening a new instance of Tableau Desktop, you'll notice a link in the top-left corner of the workspace. Clicking on that link will enable you to connect to the data. Alternatively, you can click on the New Data Source icon on the toolbar:

Figure 1.24: Connecting to data

Although in future chapters we'll connect to other data sources, here we'll limit the discussion to connecting to Microsoft Excel and text files.

Connecting to a file

Let's see how you can connect to a file, using Excel as an example:

  1. In a new instance of Tableau, navigate to...