Chapter 3. Connecting to Data

Visualizations depend on the data in them, and however aesthetically pleasing your visualization might be, it may be misleading or even wrong, unless the data has been formatted, aggregated, and properly represented.

This chapter discusses the major elements of finding, cleansing, understanding, formatting, and aggregating data that you will need to understand in order to produce accurate visualizations that tell compelling stories, including the following elements:

• Where you can get publicly available data and how to use it
• What tables and databases are
• The data formats that Tableau Public connects to
• Databases, tables, dimensions, facts, and field formats and conventions
• Preparing data to load it into Tableau
• Connecting to the data from Tableau Public
• Using the data interpreter
• Pivoting fields