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 to data

If you are familiar with Tableau Desktop, Tableau Prep Builder will be an easy game for you. The handling and interfaces are very similar, and connecting to data, if the connector is available in Prep, works all the same whether it's a text file, a database, or an extract. At first sight, you might not even notice a difference between the Tableau Prep Builder the Tableau Desktop GUIs, which provides the handy advantage that you can start prepping right away.

To get started, begin by opening Tableau Prep Builder:

Figure 3.1: Tableau Prep Builder

From here, click on the + in order to open a file. After doing so, the following screen will appear:

Figure 3.2: Connecting to data

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, the repertoire of Tableau Prep Builder includes multiple databases.

Now let's connect to a dataset with a practical...