Imagine your manager asked you to look into the overall sales and profitability for the company and to identify key areas for improvement. You have a bunch of data, but you aren’t sure where to start. Here’s how to get your data loaded into Tableau so you can begin searching for valuable insights.
Open Tableau Desktop and begin.
The first thing you see after you open Tableau Desktop is the start page. Here, you select the connector (how you will connect to your data) that you want to use.
The start page gives you several options to choose from.
Click the Tableau icon in the upper left-hand corner of any page to toggle between the start page and the authoring workspace.
Under Connect, you can:
- Connect to data that is stored in a file, such as Microsoft Excel, PDF, Spatial files, and more.
- Connect to data that is stored on a server, such as Tableau Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Google Analytics, and more.
- Connect to a data source that you’ve connected to before.
Tableau supports the ability to connect to a wide variety of data stored in a wide variety of places. The Connect pane lists the most common places to which you might want to connect, or click the More links to see more options. More on connecting to data sources in the Learning Library (in the top menu).
- Under Open, you can open workbooks that you have already created.
- Under Sample Workbooks, view sample dashboards and worksheets that come with Tableau Desktop.
- Under Discover, find additional resources like video tutorials, forums, or the “Viz of the week” to get ideas about what you can build.
In the Connect pane, under Saved Data Sources, click on Sample - Superstore to connect to the sample data set. Your screen will look something like this:
The Sample: The sample Superstore data set comes with Tableau. It contains information about products, sales, profits, and so on that you can use to identify key areas for improvement within this fictitious company. Stay tuned for our next blog later this week that will demonstrate how to get started with analyzing your data now that it's connected to Tableau.
If you agree that it’s time to stop making decisions based on poor quality data or the opinions of a few, and start making fact-based decisions supported by hard data, get in touch with Onebridge today using the link below. You can also join us in a conversation on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.
