Connecting to files in Tableau Desktop
Tableau Desktop has the flexibility to connect to many different types of data sources. First, we are going to look at flat files. Flat files have a lot of use cases from the personal analysis of downloaded files to prototyping development before connecting to enterprise databases.
The different types of flat files that Tableau can connect to include the following:
- Microsoft Excel
- Text files (including delimited and character-separated files)
- Spatial files (including Esri, GeoJSON, KML, KMZ, MapInfo, and TopoJSON files)
- Statistical files (including SAS, SPSS, and R output)
- JSON files (JavaScript Object Notation files)
- PDF files (tables from Adobe’s Portable Document Format files)
We will begin by connecting to a Microsoft Excel file.
Getting data from Microsoft Excel files
Microsoft Excel has become an almost ubiquitous method of collecting and analyzing data. Compared with Tableau, Microsoft...
