Table of Contents
Introduction
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 in 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.
Exploring Tableau
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.
How to Visualize Data with Tableau Desktop
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.
- Run Tableau Desktop .
-
From the
Start
page, select the connector type (how to connect to your data).
-
Click on the
Text
file option to select Tableau import CVS data file.
-
Once you select the file, your data will be imported, and you can use it
to visualize.
About Tableau Web Data Connector
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 connector. 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”.
How to create Tableau WDC
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:
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.
Conclusion
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.
