Basic navigation and structures

- [Instructor] To get started on transitioning from Excel to Tableau, the first step is to install it. There are two versions of Tableau. One is Tableau Public. Tableau Public is free for anyone to use and it is a great learning tool. To install Tableau Public, go to public.tableau.com. You will need to enter your email address and create a Tableau Public profile. Now Tableau Public has all of the features of the fully paid product with two important differences. One is that you can only save Tableau Public files to the Tableau Public profile. The second difference is that you cannot use Tableau Public to connect to a server. You can't connect to SQL Server or Amazon Redshift, but you can connect to files such as an Excel file, and I will be using Tableau Public in this course. To install the paid version of Tableau Desktop, go to tableau.com, and there, you can install a free 14-day trial, and at the end of that time, you would need to complete a purchase or uninstall it. If your IT department is facilitating this process for you, you'll want to follow their instructions. Once you have installed Tableau on your laptop or your desktop, you should know that Tableau also installed a file tree on your behalf. So to take a look at what they did, go to your documents folder, as you can see, I'm using a Mac, but this instruction is the same for a PC as well. So if you go to your Documents folder, you will see that Tableau has added something, a folder called My Tableau Repository. It set up some system folders and I'd like to draw your attention to the data sources and the workbooks. So the data sources folder will be the default location that Tableau will look to for data sources. The second folder I'd like you to be aware of is the Workbooks folder. This is the default save location for all of your Tableau files. Now while it is possible to connect to data that is not in this file tree and it is possible to save your Tableau workbooks anywhere, for the purposes of this class, I will be using these two folders. Great, so now you should have a version of Tableau installed and you should also understand the file tree system that Tableau installed that we will be using in this class.