In the last video, you downloaded and installed your a free edition of the Tableau Public Software. To get started, you'll need to connect Tableau to the data you're analyzing. Tableau supports the ability to connect to a wide variety of data stored in multiple ways. In this video, you'll take a look at two of the most common ways you'll likely have data given to you. You'll learn how to connect your data to Tableau to create insightful visualizations. Neo will now guide you through these steps and an instance of Tableau. The first thing you see after you open Tableau is the Start page. Here you can select the data that you want to connect to. On the left side of the Tableau Start page, you'll see the Connect pane. The Connect pane lists the most common places that you might want to connect to. These include data stored in various file types, such as Microsoft Excel, PDF, spatial files, etc. Or you might connect to data that is stored on a server such as Tableau Server, Microsoft SQL Server, or Google Analytics. Let's try connecting to an Excel file by clicking where it says Microsoft Excel. Then navigate to the Excel file that contains the clean dataset that you want to work with. For our example, we will connect to an Excel file called clean Excel example. After you select your Excel file, Tableau will connect to the data stored there. Once Tableau connects to the data in your Excel source file, it will show this connection in the Data Source screen. In the Data Source screen, you'll be able to select the specific data that you want to work with. Preview the data, and make any changes needed for the information to properly display in your visualizations. When you first arrive at the Data Source screen, you will see your connected data listed in the pane on the left side. Since an Excel file often contains several spreadsheets of data, you will see a list of all these connected sheets on the left side pane. To preview the specific data you want to work with, select the spreadsheet where that data is found. In the example shown here, we are connected to an Excel file that contains five spreadsheets of data. To select these specific data you want to work with, grab the sheet from the left side pane and drag it into the area that says Drag Tables Here. Note that if your Excel file contained only one spreadsheet rather than multiple spreadsheets, then the single sheet would automatically be selected for preview. In our example, where we have five spreadsheets to choose from, we'll work with the data contained in the sheet that's labeled states. Once I drag the states sheet into the selection area, my data populates the preview pane in the lower part of the screen. This allows you to see how Tableau has interpreted the data we have connected. For example, the column headers show you which data fields each value is associated with. The preview also shows you what type of data each field is interpreted to be. Does that value represent numerical data? Is it a text string? Does it represent geographical data? The data type will be important for Tableau to help you draw appropriate charts for your data. For example, if Tableau knows that a piece of data represents a geographical location, then it will know that a map could be a useful chart for visualizing that data. If you're preview tells you that Tableau assumes an incorrect data type for one of your data columns, you can change the type to the correct one. To do this, simply click on the "Type Indicator" symbol, and correct it there. Other changes can be made during the data preview. For example, we could rearrange our data so that it is sorted by generation rather than states. The key thing to be aware of is that the changes you make in Tableau do not modify your original data source. Your original Excel file will remain unchanged, so your data will always be safe. What happens in Tableau stays in Tableau. Once you have connected Tableau to some data and are satisfied with your data preview, you are ready to create your data visualizations. Now you know how to make the connections with an Excel file. Let's have a look at how to connect to data in a CSV file. The process for connecting to CSV files is mostly the same as for connecting two Excel files. This time however, from the Tableau startup screen, we will connect to our CSV file by selecting the "Text File" option. This is because a CSV file is just a type of text file with each line of text representing a row of data. The data values listed on each row are separated by commas. These kinds of data sources are known as comma separated values or CSV files. After you select text as the kind of file you want to connect to, you can navigate to the CSV file that contains the clean dataset you want to work with. For this example, we're going to work with the CSV file called clean CSV example. Once we've connected to our CSV file, we are taken to the Data Source Window where we can preview our data. The Data Source Window will initially behave a little differently for CSV files than for Excel files. Specifically after you connect to a CSV file, you will not need to drag and drop a table to select the data you want to preview. This is because a CSV file always represents just a single table of data. Unlike an Excel file, which will often include multiple spreadsheets to choose from. As a result, when you connect to a CSV file, the preview pane will be automatically populated with the single table of data from that file. If your CSV file was located in a folder that contained other text files, then those files will appear in the pane on the left side of the Data Source Window. In our example, our chosen CSV source file was located in a folder that contains one other CSV file. But unlike the spreadsheets in an Excel file, these other files are assumed to be a completely different dataset from the one you have chosen to work with. The preview pane is populated with the CSV file data you connected to. Now you know how to connect to both Excel and CSV files. You are ready to use Tableau to create your first data visualizations.
