Connect to Data and Simple Transformations

The first thing you usually do when opening Tableau is to connect to a dataset. You already had a glimpse of data connection in the previous chapter when we used an Excel file. In this chapter, you'll see the most important options that Tableau offers when connecting to data. Here are our main focuses:

• Data connection
• Join data easily
• Union your data
• Simple transformation

To harmonize all the different words among the various data providers, we'll use the following terms through the chapter:

• Dataset to represent any sources. It is where your data is located. It could be an Excel file, a database on a server, or a file on the cloud. The dataset is what you want to connect to Tableau.

• Tables to represent, no matter the connection, a sheet in Excel or a table in a database. For example, there are three tables in the following screenshot:

• Data Source to represent the result of your connection, after all the transformations.

Let's now start with some examples of data connections.