Book Image

Mastering Tableau 2023 - Fourth Edition

By : Marleen Meier
Book Image

Mastering Tableau 2023 - Fourth Edition

By: Marleen Meier

Overview of this book

This edition of the bestselling Tableau guide will teach you how to leverage Tableau's newest features and offerings in various paradigms of the BI domain. Updated with fresh topics, including the newest features in Tableau Server, Prep, and Desktop, as well as up-to-date examples, this book will take you from mastering essential Tableau concepts to advance functionalities. A chapter on data governance has also been added. Throughout this book, you'll learn how to use Tableau Hyper files and Prep Builder to easily perform data preparation and handling, as well as complex joins, spatial joins, unions, and data blending tasks using practical examples. You'll also get to grips with executing data densification and explore other expert-level examples to help you with calculations, mapping, and visual design using Tableau extensions. Later chapters will teach you all 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, geo-spatial analysis, and how to connect Tableau to Python and R to implement programming functionalities within Tableau. By the end of this book, you'll have mastered Tableau 2023 and be able to tackle common and advanced challenges in the BI domain.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
17
Other Books You May Enjoy
18
Index

Connecting to data

If you are familiar with Tableau Desktop, Prep 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 the same whether it’s a text file, a database, or an extract. At first sight, you might not even notice a difference between Prep and the Tableau Desktop GUIs, which provides the handy advantage that you can start prepping right away.

To get started, begin by opening Prep and click on + to open a file. The following screen will appear:

Figure 3.1: 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 Prep includes multiple databases.

Now let’s connect to a dataset with a practical exercise. For this exercise, we need the following dataset: https://www.kaggle.com/airbnb/boston. Please download calendar.csv, listings.csv...