#Tableau desktop 10.1 how to

You want both Tableau Desktop on your local machine, and Tableau Server to be able to access this folder. This can be a local location on your Tableau Server machine, but more likely would be on network storage somewhere.

A network-available folder to put the files.

With Wildcard Pattern Based Union, you can set up a process where any number of similar CSVs can be UNIONed automatically. If you can get a data source into a tabular format and store it in CSV, Tableau can read it and create an Extract in an efficient manner. Part of the magic of Tableau Desktop and Server is that they can read a CSV or Excel file and determine what type of data is in each column, and handle new columns, and do some cleanup on the front end through the drag-and-drop interface.

#Tableau desktop 10.1 how to

For what I’ll call “arbitrary” data sources, where the structure isn’t known ahead of time, the vast majority of your time and effort for any of the first three options will be on classifying the data types and figuring out how to get that to load in correctly to the database or the Tableau Extract. They are all fixed and hard-coded, requiring you to know the structure of the data ahead of time. The first three options present an major issue, even if you know how to do them technically. Export to CSV and connect Tableau to the CSV.Use the Tableau Extract SDK to convert the source into a Tableau Extract.Build a Web Data Connector that can pull the data into a Tableau Extract.Build an import process into a database, then connect Tableau to the database.When you have data that is not already in a database, that you’d like to continually update, you have a few options for getting it in to Tableau:

Not only is this an immensely helpful feature for saving time the first time you are doing analysis, it also can save a ton of development time and effort when you are dealing with data sources that aren’t already in a database.Įffective Alternative to Web Data Connector (WDC) To see how it works, check out the ever excellent Tableau Online Help. Now, you can set up a match pattern to bring in all the files you have into the UNION automatically.

Tableau has had UNION for Excel and text files for several versions now, but Tableau 10.1 delivers a huge expansion of the feature with Wildcard Pattern-Based UNION.