How to Download & Install Tableau for FREE | Install Tableau on Windows

"Tableau can help anyone see and understand their data. Connect to almost any database, drag and drop to create visualizations, and share with a click." - from www.tableau.com. So, to see and understand data in Tableau (to be more specific to exploit the full power of Tableau), first, some data should be present in Tableau. This guide will clearly define the ways in which a user can import data from various sources into Tableau. To import data from an excel file, first, click on "Microsoft Excel" under the connect tab. It will open a dialog box where you can navigate to the Excel file in your machine from which you want to import the data. Then, click on the file and click on ‘Open’. If there are multiple sheets in your Excel workbook, all of them will be imported automatically and they will be listed as sheets on the left-hand side panel of Tableau. Remember that any formulas you have written in Excel won't be imported into Tableau. Also, Tableau queries the file for data and imports the data only. So, if any data is updated in the source file, the connection needs to be refreshed each time the data is modified to keep the data up-to-date in Tableau. Also, remember that pivot tables in excel are not supported by Tableau. File extensions, in this case, would be .xls and .xlsx. To add more data (which can be from any source) into the existing workbook, just click on "add" which is present beside connections on the left pane. Sometimes Tableau recommends using the inbuilt data interpreter to use while importing the data. There is no need to worry about it; it justs formats the data. Adding more data and using the data interpreter are the two most common steps that you will use while importing data from any sources or file formats. The first few steps are similar to that of importing data from Microsoft Excel. After clicking on "Text File", navigate to the file that you’re importing, click on "Open", and the data in the text file will be imported. The most frequently used file formats are .txt, .csv, .tab, .tsv. While importing from a text file, the most important property is the delimiter. To change the properties, first, click on the “options” in the text file which will give a drop-down, and then select the "Text File Properties", From the menu, you can edit the Field Separator, Text Qualifier, Character Set, and Locale. Field Separator is our delimiter. Character Set is the encoding used to encode the text file. In most cases, Tableau auto-detects these values. Only in some cases, will you want to edit these.