DATA COLLECTION

While most of the examples shown in this book are based on the Superstore sample dataset included in your Tableau installation, it can of course be more interesting to try out your newly acquired skills on real‐world problems. Because not everyone who wants to learn how to use Tableau has ready access to real‐world data (whether stored in a file or on a database), in this section I will show you two other strategies for obtaining interesting datasets.

Data Collection with IFTTT and Google Sheets

IFTTT (If This, Then That) is an online tool that allows you to set up automation tasks (applets) that run automatically when a certain condition is fulfilled. IFTTT applets that write their output into Google Sheets are especially useful for obtaining data. With these two tools, you can record different types of events in Google Sheets tables and thereby build your own dataset over time.

For example, you can set up IFTTT to collect all tweets published that contain...