Tableau Web Scraping – How to Visualize Big Data with Tableau

In the world of business, big data is the most important thing to make proper and effective business decisions. Today almost every business, even a small start-up generates data. If a company has a website, a presence on social media, and accepts electronic payments, it can generate data about its customers.

Later on, the information can be scraped and may become a big potential for future business decisions. When you need to represent this data in a graphical format to communicate it clearly and efficiently, data visualization comes into play. In this article, we’ll talk about Tableau, and how it can help users in data visualization.

A Tableau is a powerful tool for data visualization that can be used for modern business intelligence. Thanks to Tableau web scraping feature you can extract data from the web sources and give it a visual format to make it more understandable. The tool also enables real-time scraping and cloud support.

Tableau Software offers 3 main options:

• Tableau Desktop – a data visualization tool transforming the boring tabulated data into attractive graphs that also enable real-time data analytics.
• Tableau Public – a free version that is used to make visualizations in the Tableau Server.
• Tableau Online – a hosted version of Tableau Server where Tableau is available to everyone; your business intelligence will be available on the go and can be shared with others as well.

Once you get Tableau Software, you can connect your data file and create an interactive data visualization. Let’s consider Tableau Desktop for creating data visualization for your data saved in a CSV file.

Tableau Web Data Connector (WDC) enables you to connect to the required web data source accessed via HTTP and use Tableau to scrape, analyze and visualize the data. Tableau has already created WDCs for different platforms like Tableau Twitter web data connectors. But you can also create your own WDCs, for example, to get data from Instagram periodically and visualize it. All you need is to know how APIs operate and to have some basic skills of a “Google developer”.

The WDC principle is simple. The HTML part is what we see, and to connect to web data we use the JavaScript code that reads JSON response and passes data on to Tableau. You can connect to any data from the web services, REST APIs, and JSON data, or any other sources available over HTTP. For building your own WDC you need:

• Git,
• WDC SDK to build connectors,
• Web server for your WDC.

Once you have all the required staff, follow the instructions on how to build Web Data Connectors or look for the SDK code samples and supporting documentation on the Tableau Community page.

Tableau is a handy data visualization tool. Thanks to Tableau, you can process large amounts of data and organize them in a convenient format for work and analysis.

There are two ways to process data with Tableau. First, you can upload your collected data file to Tableau Desktop. Secondly, you can connect a data source (website analytics, social media pages, or any other open database) directly to Tableau with WDC (Tableau Web Data Connector). Tableau will process the incoming data and visualize it in a format convenient for you.

Tableau has a REST API service allowing access to different resources on its server. Every service and data type requires separate scripts. Therefore, follow the official documentation and use developer help.

Once you decide to visualize your scraped data, refer to DataOx’s professionals who are always happy to help you with professional advice and service. Schedule a free consultation with our expert and find out how web scraping and data visualization can help you boost your business.