From the course: Tableau Essential Training

Connect to a data source - Tableau Tutorial

From the course: Tableau Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Connect to a data source

“

- [Instructor] When you are ready to create a visualization in Tableau, you need to connect to an outside data source. In this movie, I will show you how to connect to an Excel workbook but the skills that I show you will apply to other types of data sources as well. I have run Tableau, and I want to create a connection to an Excel file. So I will go over to the Connect pane, and I want to connect to Excel, so I'll click Microsoft Excel. That opens the Open Dialogue box, and the file that I want to use is HPlus Data so I'll double click that. Tableau creates a connection, and because it was the only sheet available, it appears here. If there were multiple sheets that I could select from, they would appear here in this list where Sheet 1 is by itself right now, and you would click it and drag it over so that it would appear. What you just saw was Tableau trying to create a connection between two copies of Sheet 1, and I don't cover connections or joins in this movie, I do that elsewhere in the course. So here we have the worksheet that's been imported and I can see my field list down here at the bottom left. So that's Sheet 1, and also the field name, and the name in the remote data source. And then, I get a 100 row preview of my data over here on the right, and everything looks good when I scroll over. I don't see any weird breaks in the data so that looks good. And I can now go to Sheet 1, and over on the left in the sidebar, I see all of the fields and measures that are included with my data. And from here, I can create a new visualization. So I'll drag over Customer State to the rows area and I'll drag over Sheet 1 count, which is a count of the number of orders for each of the states. I'll drag that to the data area, make sure that the plus sign appears to the bottom right of my mouse pointer. And there we go. I have created my first visualization. From here, I can save it by going up to the save button on the toolbar where I can press Ctrl+S, or go to the File menu and click Save. In any event, I have created a visualization based on data that I brought in from Microsoft Excel.

Contents