The Data Source Page and WorkSpace — The Tableau Student Guide

Data Source Page

After you load your data set into Tableau from the start page, the Data Source page will automatically open. The Data Source page is where you can view your data that you’ve loaded, make joins and unions, change data types of your fields, and more.

Flag 1 - This shows you the data file you loaded. Here you can rename your data source or edit your connection to the source.

Flag 2 - The Data Interpreter is a built-in data cleaner that Tableau provides. If you choose to use it, it can identify potential areas to clean and will re-format them and provide a log of the changes they made.

Flag 3 - This area shows the “sheets/tabs” that are in your data source. For example, because we are using an Excel file here, the original data source has multiple sheets.

Flag 4 - If you want to use multiple sheets, you can drag them into the main space here to make a join or union connection.

Flag 5 - Here you can choose the data connection you want your workbook to have. In the simplest terms, live connections have real-time updates when you’re connected to the database. A data extract is “extracted” from the database to provide a little snapshot of the data which can be refreshed at will. An extract is faster when you’re building bigger and more complicated visualizations. For a student’s sake, since you may be mostly using a file data source the connection doesn’t matter as much until you go to publish it to Tableau Public. (See section on Tableau Public).

Flag 6 - Here is where you can view your data. It is important to know that Tableau needs the data to be in a tabular format, with clean headers. Tableau will analyze your data and automatically assign data types to them, denoted by little symbols. For example, “Abc” refers to string values, “#” refers to numerical measures, and the little globe icon refers to a geographic role. You can click on these icons and change the data type if you notice that Tableau incorrectly assigned a type your field. It is also very important to note that Tableau does not change you original data source! Any changes that you make to your data within tableau, like changing a header name, or a data type, will not change the data in your original source.

The Tableau Workspace

Above is a blank Tableau sheet. When you load in your data source, Tableau will also automatically provide you with your first sheet.

Let’s break down the workspace and examine top bar first.

Flag 1 - This little Tableau icon will bring you back to the start page.

Flag 2 - The holy grail of Tableau and probably the most used part of Tableau. These are unlimited undo and redo buttons!

Flag 3 - These icons here are the flip and sort buttons. The flip button will switch your columns and rows back and forth. The sort buttons will quickly sort your view (like a bar chart) in ascending or descending order.

Flag 4 - This will fit your charts to either standard size, fit width, fit height, or fit entire view.

Flag 5 - Show Me is a handy tool for beginners to help you build quick charts and graphs. The “Building Basic Views” section dives deeper into Show Me.

Now let’s examine the main section:

Flag 6 - In this section we have our data tab, where we can find all our measures, our analytics tab, where we can supplement our views with reference bands, forecasts, trend lines, and more. We can also see our data source connection. If you decide to connect to multiple data sources within one workbook, you’ll be able to choose which data source you want to draw from there.

Flag 7 - This is a very handy little button that shows you a quick look into your data table. Instead of switching back and forth from your workspace to the Data Source page to look at your data, you can just click that button to quickly see your data.

Flag 8 - The Dimensions tab is where you can find all your categorical fields. (More on this in the “Dimensions and Measures” post.)

Flag 9 - The Measures tab is where you can find all your numerical measures. (More on this in the “Dimensions and Measures” post.)

Flag 10 - You can click these little tabs to open a new Sheet, Dashboard, or Story.

Flag 11 - The Filters card is where you can drag various fields to filter your view.

Flag 12 - This bar in the marks card is a drop down menu of different chart and graph types you can use, like bar, area, gantt, pie chart and more.

Flag 13 - These cards in the marks card is used if you want to add color, sizes, text, tooltips, or more to your visualizations.

Flag 14 - The Columns and Rows section is how you build your views. You can drag various fields to this area to make your visualizations.

Flag 15 - This is where your visualizations will appear. You can also drop fields there to let Tableau automatically choose how to visualize it.

Written by: Maria Brock