Welcome back. In the last lesson, we discussed the three main areas of Tableau's Welcome Screen: discover, open and connect. We ended on connecting to a data source and in this next series of lessons, I'm going to walk you through the anatomy of the worksheet screen, so you'll be able to identify its various parts. First though, I'd like you to pick any old data source you might have laying around your computer or in your Google Drive. As long as it has at least one column and one row of data, it will suffice, doesn't much matter what it is, because it will only be serving to demonstrate what Tableau looks like when it's populated with data. An empty Tableau is a sad Tableau. Feel free to pause the video and come back once you have a data source ready. My data source is a Google sheet that I've used to build a viz about a Dungeons and Dragons Twitch stream that I like to watch. But it could just as easily have been a single column of numbers from Excel. Once you've selected the right data connector from the Welcome Screen and imported the file, you'll arrive at the data connection window. Now just drag one of the options you see on the left to where it says "Drag tables or sheets here." Then, at the bottom left of the screen, go to sheet 1 to get into the workbook itself and that's it. As I said, we're not actually going to use this data for anything, it's really just to see what Tableau looks like when you have data in there. I also want to note here that if at any point in this lesson you need to stop and come back later, I'd encourage you to save your workbook to Tableau Public so that you can easily open it back up from the Welcome Screen when you're ready to pick up where you left off. It will show up in your recent workbook so it will be very easy to find. On this screen, we'll start from the top and go left to right as we move down the page. I'll be providing you with an annotated screenshot in the materials. So I'll go pretty quickly here because there's a lot of ground to cover. The first button you'll see looks like the Tableau logo. We already know what that one does. It brings you back to the Welcome Screen. Next, you have undo and redo, aka back and forward, followed by the save icon. The next icon, the cylinder with a plus sign, lets you create a new data connection. The next icon lets you create a new worksheet. The drop-down menu, additionally, let's you create a new dashboard or a new story. We'll talk about those in a little bit when we get to the bottom of the screen. The next button lets you easily duplicate this worksheet and then the next button, lets you clear the sheet so you can start completely over. Next, you'll find a button that allows you to easily swap the rows and columns. This is super useful, say when you have a chart with vertical bars, but you decide you want them to be horizontal instead. It really is as easy as the click of a button. After that, you have Sort Ascending and Sort Descending buttons. The next four buttons, the pencil and drop-down, the paperclip and drop-down, the T and the box and the pen, I confess that I have literally never used any of them as of this writing. So we'll touch on those as they become relevant. The drop-down that currently says Standard, however, is quite useful. This adjusts the fit of your worksheet. Standard doesn't have any constraints. Fit Width stretches or squishes all of your data to fit with the width of your window. Fit Height does the same, but fits the height of your window and Entire View fits all of your data into the width and height of your window. Very, very useful this drop-down. Next, is the Show and Hide Cards button, which allows you to easily show and hide various fields that are currently available on the screen. For example, if you're on a tiny screen and you need more real estate, you can hide the pages shelf and free up some space. Next, is the Present button, which is basically a full screen option for your worksheet. Finally, all the way on the right, you see the Show Me menu. As a Tableau beginner, this menu will likely be your best friend. But just rest assured that there are more viz options out there than what you see in the Show Me menu. We'll go over this a little more next week when we actually make a real viz. Back over on the left, you see Data and Analytics menu tabs and a little icon that lets you hide the entire side panel for a bit more real estate. You can easily bring it back by going to the bottom of the screen and clicking the little icon again. Moving down the column on the Data menu, you'll first see your data source that you connected to. Here's how you can tell what kind of connection you have to your data source. In Tableau Public, you'll only have live connections or extracts. If you used a local Excel sheet, for instance, you'll likely have a live connection, or if you used Google sheets like I did, then you'll have an extract. When you use a live connection, your data stays in your data source. Whenever you make any changes to your view, be that using a filter or adding fields to the worksheet, Tableau will send a query to your data source and pull back only the relevant data to display in your worksheet. With an extract however, Tableau makes a copy of your data source in its own data format, called a hyper file, with a.hyper file extension, and stores the data with your workbook. Then again, when you make any changes on your view, such as a filter or adding fields to the worksheet, Tableau only queries that hyper file. There are good reasons to use one or the other, neither is better than the other. But to publish anything to Tableau public, your data source has to be an extract. So we'll go over how to do that later. It's really as easy as selecting one radio button, instead of the default. So don't worry. Moving down from the data source, you'll see Dimensions followed by the names of many of the columns from your data file. When you pulled in the table or sheet from the file, Tableau guessed each column's datatype. It then takes the non-numeric columns and puts them under Dimensions because they tend to be more descriptive and aren't things you'd want to say, sum up or average. The numerical ones go under Measures. Now, if you have a column like ID, that is only numeric, Tableau is going to put that under Measures. But all you have to do is click and drag it up with the dimensions and it will be moved. To the left of the name of each column is an indicator of its datatype. A, b, c for a text string, a calendar for a date, a calendar with a little clock for a date, time, or a timestamp, T or F for Boolean, a little globe for geographic data, and a harsh symbol for numeric data. You'll probably notice blue and green colors that work too. The color of the datatype indicator should match the color of the pill when you hover or click on it. Green means continuous data and blue means discrete. At the bottom of Dimensions, you'll see that Tableau added a field called Measure Names and similarly, at the bottom of Measures, a field called Measure Values. These fields are useful for visualizing, but just remember that they can be referenced in calculations, which we'll get to later. Above Measure Values, you'll see that Tableau also creates a measure called Number of Records, which you can use in calculations, and is very handy. Drag it out to the view right now like I'm doing, and you'll see how many rows of data there are in your file. Let's go ahead and leave that there for now, because it'll be useful to us in a minute. Before we move on to the next column of stuff, I want to point out a few little icons up beside the word, dimensions. First, you have what looks like a little spreadsheet table. Clicking this will allow you to see all of the data in the current data source in a tabular format. Your first thought, may be that this is unnecessary since you know what it looked like when you imported it. But this gets really, really handy when you start making your own calculations and you want to check to make sure something is calculated correctly. Because the values of your calculated fields will always show in this view of your data, where they of course will not show in your original data file, because they don't exist there. Besides the little Table icon, is a magnifying glass, useful for searching within your Dimensions and Measures. Odds are, you didn't import a very large file, but when you do have a data source with a couple of dozen columns or even more, or you have things sorted into folders and you can't find a column, just use the Search button here to find it very easily. Finally on this menu, to the right of the Search icon is a little Drop-down carrot. This is the exact same menu as when you right-click in the empty space below your Dimensions or your Measures. From here, you can create a new calculation or a parameter, or you can sort your fields into folders, or reorder them, or whatever. If your data source has a zillion fields, but you're only using a few of them in your workbook, you can hide all unused fields to tidy things up a bit, and make it easier to find what you're looking for. That's about it for the Data menu, so let's quickly go back to the top and click on the "Analytics" menu. I won't go over this in great detail because we won't be using it in this course, but just know that Tableau has powerful analytics built into its engine, to help make your life easier. You can easily add many statistical measures to your graphs just by clicking and dragging. Pretty neat.
