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
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17
Index

Connecting to data sources

One of the beauties of Tableau is the ease with which you can connect to many different data sources in various ways. As mentioned earlier in this book, there are many connectors defined in Tableau for interfacing with a variety of data sources. Furthermore, this flexibility extends beyond simply connecting to single tables or files.

Although Tableau makes it easy to connect to various data sources, it should be stressed that Tableau is not an Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) tool. If complex joins and complex data blending are required to generate useful results, it may be advisable to perform ETL work outside of Tableau, for example, in Tableau Prep Builder (see Chapter 3, Tableau Prep Builder, for more information on this service). ETL work will ideally lead to better data modeling and thus easier authoring and quicker performance in Tableau.

The four ways in which Tableau connects to data are as follows:

  • Tableau may...