Explore Data and Workspaces in Tableau Next
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Define what a workspace is in Tableau Next and describe its key features.
- Describe how to connect and manage data within a workspace.
- Explain how to upload files and reference existing assets.
Explore Workspaces and Data Connections
In Tableau Next, a workspace is a flexible, structured place where you can create and reference analytic assets, like data sources, semantic models, visualizations, and dashboards, to answer questions about your data. Think of a workspace as a well-equipped workshop with all the tools and supplies you need to create something meaningful from your source material, data.
How Workspaces and Analytic Assets Work Together
A workspace in Tableau Next is designed to handle all parts of the analytics process. You can connect to data, prepare and model it, and create actionable visualizations and dashboards. The tab navigation makes it easy to work on multiple assets simultaneously, and you can use existing assets from other workspaces or a connected Data 360 org to speed up your analysis.
Data insights can be difficult to find, easily ignored, or worst of all, not trustworthy. Tableau Next helps solve those problems by making it easy to use a single source of truth across multiple areas. When you create a semantic model in a workspace, for example, your colleagues working in another workspace can reference it, too.
And since Tableau Next is built on Data 360, you can add a reference to existing Data 360 objects and models to your workspace. A reference maintains a connection to the original source, so you’re always up to date. This also applies to any assets you build off that reference, like a visualization that uses a semantic model from somewhere else.
Alternately, you can clone dashboards and visualizations from other workspaces into yours. This creates an independent copy of the asset, so your edits won’t impact the source asset.
Bring Data into Your Workspace
Data analysis starts with, well, data. To analyze your data, you must connect it to a workspace. There are multiple ways to connect to data in a Tableau Next workspace.
- Upload a .csv file. Once the file is uploaded, you can check that your data is clean and ready for analysis by inspecting the fields and sample data or by adjusting the data types or field names.
- Add an existing asset from a Data 360 org, such as data model objects, data lake objects, semantic models, and calculated insights. Changes you make in Tableau Next won’t affect the source data object in Data 360, so you can experiment freely.
- Add a reference to an existing asset. You can reference data that other users have added to their Tableau Next workspaces for your own analysis, or use them to create more analytical assets.
Workspace Approaches
Just like a workshop can be organized in different ways depending on what you’re building, you can organize your Tableau Next workspaces around different purposes. Here are two common approaches.
- A workspace for an ad-hoc investigation is when you create a workspace to find the root cause of a problem, gather insights, or test out a new dataset. In this workspace, you can gather all relevant analysis to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the area you’re investigating. This workspace can be temporary and removed once your investigation is complete, or it can serve as a starting point for a larger project. As your investigation evolves, you can create more workspaces with different focuses.
- A workspace to build a specific asset or collection of assets, like a dashboard. This can include all the assets that are directly related to constructing the dashboard–and all those that are just attempts, validation of data, or drafts that didn’t work.
Summary
In this unit, you learned about workspace capabilities that make data analysis more efficient and connected, how you can create new workspaces for different purposes, and how to start a new analysis cycle by adding data. Happy data exploring!