Connecting to data
1. Connecting to data
Welcome back! In this screencast we’ll cover the different data connectors in Tableau and how you can save your data sources as TDS files. So far in this course, you have been bringing in data from either an Excel worksheet or from a CSV file. To get to the data you used in this chapter, we added an Excel file by clicking on Microsoft Excel in the To a File Section. There are many other ways to bring in data into Tableau as well. In fact, one of the most impressive things about Tableau is its ability to connect to lots and lots of data sources. If we go back to the connect page, we can see the four main categories. You can connect to a Tableau Server if your company has set that up. You can connect to different file types like Excel, CSV, and so on, which is what we did before. You could even pull in data from PDF files here, if you have a table with some financial data in PDF format for example. You can also connect to a server. As you can see the most popular databases have been added here. And then you can connect to saved data sources, which we’ll talk about more in a second. Let’s take a closer look at the options within the Server section. These integrated connectors get you a native connection to many different online environments. The key here is that whatever login credentials you have to log in to the database, will be the same login credentials you’ll use here. Note that the number of data connectors in Tableau Public is limited compared to the ones offered in Tableau Desktop, which is what you’re seeing here. If you want access to all connectors, you’ll need to purchase a license. Throughout this chapter we’ve been making edits to the data, such as changing measures into dimensions, changing data types and names, editing the default properties, assigning geo roles, and creating hierarchies. You don’t want to do all of this again each time you add that data source. Luckily, in Tableau, there is a way to save this metadata about the data. The way to do that is by opening the workbook that has the connection to the data you want to save as a file. At the top of the Data pane, I’ll right-click the name of the data source, and then select Add to Saved Data Sources. I can then specify the location for the file to be saved. As you can see here the file will be saved with a TDS extension. By default, Tableau saves .tds files to the Datasources folder under your Tableau repository. When you use the default location, you can connect to the data source on the Connect pane, under Saved Data Sources. If you specified a different location, you can connect to the data source by selecting File and then Open and navigating to it. So TDS files are basically a shortcut that you create after you have enriched your data and want to share what you've done. Note that at the moment saving TDS files is only possible in Tableau Desktop not on Tableau Public. So you’ll have to purchase a license if you want to access this functionality. Over to you!2. Let's practice!
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