VIDEO: How to – Tableau | Connect to a Data Source (Google Drive)

Tableau is a BI tool that helps users navigate huge swaths of data that come in from a bunch of different data sources. That said, there’s a lot going on and when I first started using it I was plenty confused. So this series is meant to help new users get used to the system. But, before all that, hi! I’m Kyle. Hope you’ve been good and great, great and good. And today, I’ll be showing you how to connect Tableau to a Data Source, and more specifically, to Google Drive.

Without further ado, let’s get started. So here’s an example set of data we can use for today. Nothing fancy, just a handful of rows and columns with some data on a Google Sheet all stored on Google Drive. So when you first load up Tableau’s desktop app, this is the screen that’ll greet you. The blurred section is where you’d normally find your own Tableau sheets or dashboards, but that’s our company’s stuff and you don’t need to see all that. Obviously for you, it would not be blurred and it would have any of your previously loaded and created data.

On the left here you can see a list of different data types you can connect to. You can connect to local files like excel sheets, json files, pdf files, and more. What’s even cooler is you can also connect directly to servers like oracle, amazon redshift, google drive and google bigquery, as well as others if you click on the ‘more…’ button. Let’s try that, and… boom. A huge smorgasbord of options here that you can choose from. If that isn’t enough for you, if you choose the ‘web data connector’ or ‘other databases’ options you can create a custom connection.

That said, that’s a lot more advanced than we’ll be getting into, but long story short, you’ve got tons of options for connecting to servers. Since our data source is on google drive, we’ll click there. The system will then ask us to log in to google to make sure we have authorization to connect the data source, so go ahead and follow the directions on screen to do that. Again, this is how it’d look for google, but it’ll look similar for whatever other system you’re connecting to.

Once the connection is completed, you’ll see the window now says “Tableau created this window to authenticate. It is now safe to close it.” which basically means, “it worked, so close this window and go back to Tableau” so we’ll do just that. So back in Tableau, you’ll see this ‘connect to google drive’ pop up. This’ll have a list of all of your docs you’ve synced up to Tableau using Google Drive in the past, and you can arrange it by name, kind, or last modified date.

You can also just use the search bar to find the document you need. We called ours “Tableau Test Data’ so I’ll type that into the search bar. Regardless of how you do it, find the sheet you just connected and double click on it. As you can see we now have this connection added in, you can see it over here on the left side. The cool thing is you can actually have multiple different data connections at once. You see how there’s a blue bar here next to our Tableau Test Data connection?

If you look down here at the data, you can see that same blue used to show us where that data is coming from. So if I had several other data connections, you’d see their corresponding colors on their data columns and rows too, so you can easily parse out what data is coming from which source. You can see on the left side the sheets from your connected source. We only had one on our dummy data sheet, called ‘Sheet1.’ If you hover over that sheet name, you’ll see the ‘view data’ icon pop up.

If you click on that, it’ll show you your data that’s been pulled in from Google Drive. Now an important thing to remember about Tableau is that it’s READING the data. So any changes, edits, rearranging, or whatever else you do WITHIN Tableau will not have an effect on the data sources themselves. Another important thing to note, you see here on the top right corner where you can choose between a Live connection or an Extract connection. More often than not, you’ll want to use the extract option, especially if you’re connecting directly to a server that charges you for the amount of data that is being pulled.

The reasoning behind that is that ‘live’ means every time you do anything in Tableau, it is constantly running a SQL query again and again to ensure that the data is up to date each time. While this is great for moment by moment accuracy, it also means that it’s not terribly efficient, and can definitely be costly if you’re being charged for your data pulls. The extract option instead creates a local copy of your data source specifically for Tableau and this can be set up to pull at regular intervals of your choosing, instead of pulling ALL THE TIME.

This tends to be a more efficient and cost friendly way to handle these data pulls, and that’s what we’re going to do in this example. Now I’ll go down to the bottom left corner of the screen and click on ‘sheet1’ and this’ll open up a save extract as window, so I’ll go ahead and name it whatever makes sense for us, and the file type is ‘Tableau Data Extract .hyper’. The extract creates a file on your device and then the tableau dashboard references that file.

Now since our data source was pretty simple, it’ll build out pretty quickly, but if you have huge chunks of data, it might take a while. But once it’s done, congratulations! You’ve now connected your Tableau to a data source. That wraps up this video! I know, it’s a bit of a cliffhanger isn’t it? Well, stay tuned for more videos coming soon so you can see all the neat stuff we can do in Tableau with that data. While Tableau is a great tool, it’s not the only BI tool out there.

If you wanna see more business intelligence tools, visit TechnologyAdvice.com for our list of the top options available today. Thanks for watching, go be good and great, great and good.