Quote:
Originally Posted by ice.berg
This program looks like a great way to quickly look at data with its primarily visual presentation. I know in the tutorials it shows how to import the data through access. Currently we are using excel to dump all of our raw data into.
-Do you recommend going with access? I have never really used it before but looks like a definite improvement in ease of use compared to excel
-Have you had experience with importing from excel? and/or why did you choose access over excel?
Really want to have our team implementing this program this year but having a difficult time understanding the importing part of the process.
Thanks for your help and push to make this available to all FIRST teams!
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Hey Alex,
The main reason we use Access now is that it is really easy to enter data into. I don't know if the video really showed it off, but entering data into Access is really simple and it is hard for people to put something in the wrong spot or to override old data. However, if your team likes entering data like it is usually entered in excel, Access can do that too. The main improvement that Access has over Excel is easy of use.
However, if you want to continue using Excel for data storage, that works too. I have used Excel with Tableau a lot, and it is very easy. The one thing you have to do is make sure that your data is raw, not pivoted. For example, raw data looks like:
team, match, a, b, c,
1234, 1, 3, 43, 4,
1563, 1, 4, 2, 5,
2432, 5, 2, 4, 6,
while pivoted data looks like:
Team 1234
Match: 1
a: 3
b: 43
c: 4
Team 1563
Match 1
a 4
b 2
c 5
and so on
As long as any source is organized in the raw data way, then Tableau can import it really easily. All databases (like MySQL) are automatically organized this way, and so are most CSVs. The easiest way to check for this is to make sure that there are no "header rows" besides the name of the columns.
Tableau also has a few good resources for this:
-Tableau's tutorial for importing data:
http://www.tableausoftware.com/learn...and-text-files
-Tableau's data reshaping tool
http://kb.tableausoftware.com/articl...ing-data-excel
Hope this helps, and if you have any more questions, don't hesitate to ask,
Quinn