1. Connecting to data
When opening Tableau, you land on the Start Page. Before creating any visualization, however, you need to have some data available. Let’s see how to connect to a data source using Tableau. There are many data sources you can connect to: here on the left, you can see the data sources that are available with Tableau Public. The professional version of Tableau has a lot more possibilities.
Throughout this course, you will mainly use CSV files, so let’s see how to connect to those. CSV means Comma Separated Values: it’s a text file where values are separated by commas. So let’s click on Text File here. This takes you to the Datasources folder on the Desktop.
Let’s open the Airbnb San Francisco CSV. Tableau redirects you to the Data Source page, where you can now preview the data. Each row is a different Airbnb listing. We have data about neighborhood, location, room type, price, and so on. If you want to rename a column, you can change it by double-clicking the column name. Note that this will not change the column name in the original data source. Let’s change “neighbourhood” to use the US spelling.
Above the column names, icons indicate the data type. For example, there is a number sign for numbers, a globe for locations, or Abc for text. Tableau is pretty good at guessing data types, but it can make mistakes, so reviewing the assigned types is good practice. You can change these types if necessary, by clicking the icon and selecting the appropriate data type.
From here, you can also go to the worksheet, which we will discuss in the next lesson; create a new worksheet; or create dashboards and stories, which will be covered later.
You can also load a prepared Tableau workbook, containing data sources and visualizations. Clicking on File, and then Open, you can navigate to the Workbooks folder on the Desktop. Here, you will find the necessary workbooks for the exercises.
Ready to start using Tableau? Let’s do some exercises.
2. Let's practice!