Tableau Certified Data Analyst Study Guide

Chapter 1. Connecting to and Transforming Data

A Note for Early Release Readers

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I’ve worked in Tableau for over ten years. During that time, I’ve come to realize that a majority of my work isn’t in building charts, designing dashboards, or analyzing data–it’s in connecting to, cleaning, and structuring the data before I even get started. I now understand that building meaningful visualizations depends on well structured and properly combined data sets. Most errors I find during my analysis appear due to mistakes that happened during the original data pull. Getting the data into Tableau correctly and efficiently is absolutely essential to generating accurate and actionable insights.

Tableau Desktop and Tableau Prep Builder work directly with data from a variety of sources. They can connect locally to file types such as Excel, CSV, or JSON, or to hosted database tables such as those in Oracle, Microsoft SQL, or Postgres. With such a large variety of data source options, ...