I'm perhaps asking too much, but I'd like to integrate Excel, R, and Tableau, and they each seem to have quirks that just really make it hard to do that. I had been exporting some tables from R as .RData files and importing them into Tableau, but now, the version of R I'm using isn't supported: I'm on R version 3.6.1 and Tableau only can read .RData files from 3.5.3 at the latest. Rather than go back a version in R, I exported my data to Excel and then imported them into Tableau. The problem, though, is that R exports N/A values as "NA", and when Tableau reads "NA" from an Excel file, it assumes that the data format is text. Please, please, PLEASE do not tell me that I need to go convert all ~100 fields where I have NA values into numeric data by multiplying by 1 or something similar because I'd rather cut my lawn with fingernail clippers. Is there any way to specify what constitutes an NA value when you're first importing the data into Tableau? Something akin to the R command read.table(..., na.strings = "NA")
I'm not attaching an example because I don't think this merits it, but if you really, really need one, please ask and I'll make one up.
Thanks for any help.
Hi Laura,
I'm hoping someone can give you a better answer, but upon testing with a file from Excel - changing the data type in Tableau from string to numeric automatically converts this to Null. I'm unsure if this is the desired behavior or what you're expecting, however. Hopefully someone more experienced in integrating R can be of service.
Best,
Bryce
