Where To Find Data Sets

Quick reference

• 00:04 Okay, before we really dive into Tableau,
• 00:06 I want to spend just a couple of minutes talking about data.
• 00:08 So it really doesn't matter what you're doing in Tableau.
• 00:11 You have to have some sort of data set in order to use it.
• 00:14 You have to have information, you have to have data.
• 00:17 And while you're learning, using good data sets is going to be important.
• 00:22 Because so often in data analysis, getting good data is rough.
• 00:26 You get these giant data sets, and
• 00:28 they may have sort of gaps in information along the way.
• 00:32 They may be formatted incorrectly, they may be mostly formatted correctly, and
• 00:36 then there's certain cells that are just garbage.
• 00:39 You get used to working with files like this,
• 00:42 as you become more experienced and you learn how to sort of clean up your data.
• 00:47 When you're getting started, it's really hard.
• 00:49 So it's important to find really good data sets to work with while you're learning
• 00:53 at the beginning.
• 00:54 And so in this video, I want to spend just a couple of minutes talking about where
• 00:58 you can find some data sets where there's some good stuff,
• 01:01 where you can find free data sets, and stuff like that.
• 01:04 So first thing I want to show you is Kaggle, and this is at kaggle.com.
• 01:08 Now, we're not going to use this, but this is probably the most popular place to find
• 01:13 data sets for data analysis in the world, right?
• 01:16 So we can come over here, and we could just click on data sets.
• 01:19 This is all free, you have to sign up, you have to come over here to register and
• 01:23 create an account, I don't think it costs anything.
• 01:26 And then when you do, you can find just tons and
• 01:28 tons of really interesting and usually really clean data to work with.
• 01:33 Temperature change, wind power, whatever you're looking for, you can find here.
• 01:38 So I don't know, if we want to look up pets or something,
• 01:42 I would just type in pets.
• 01:44 And you can see, here's a data set of adoptable dogs.
• 01:46 We're going to do some pet dog data throughout our course, we're not going to
• 01:50 get it from Kaggle, but it's still kind of interesting nonetheless.
• 01:53 Pet Adoption Modified Data Cleaned, and so this has been cleaned up for you.
• 01:58 And you can usually see, it says a CSV file, that's a comma-separated value file,
• 02:03 it's a general spreadsheet file.
• 02:05 And just looking through here, whatever you like, you can find.
• 02:09 Now we can type in Titanic, I don't know, and you can find data sets on the Titanic,
• 02:16 right, really interesting and just all kinds of cool stuff.
• 02:20 So I suggest you check out this website, play around with it.
• 02:24 It's a great way to find data sets.
• 02:26 Now what we're going to use is something called data.gov.
• 02:29 And this is US government data, it's all free, it's all open source,
• 02:33 and you can use it however you like.
• 02:35 If you go to data.gov, this is the website.
• 02:38 And you can sort of click on topics, right, see different topics here.
• 02:44 You can click on just data, and you can see there's 217,615 data sets.
• 02:50 And this is just basically public government data, right, that you can use.
• 02:57 So If we come through here, we can see local weather, Alleghany,
• 03:02 is that how you pronounce that, County Sheriff Sales.
• 03:07 Think that's Pennsylvania, yeah, Pittsburgh.
• 03:10 We're actually going to use a pet data set for dog adoption stats,
• 03:14 that's what we're going to be using throughout this course.
• 03:17 But again, just come through here, and you can search by different things.
• 03:21 You can look for local government, education, climate, AAP,
• 03:25 whatever that is, I or L, older adult health.
• 03:29 And there's topics by categories, there's data set types,
• 03:33 different tags you can look through, formats, right?
• 03:36 You're generally going to want to stick to CSV files usually, or sometimes XML, or
• 03:41 probably CSV files, those are comma-separated values,
• 03:44 basic spreadsheet format.
• 03:47 Organization types, federal government, state government, city government,
• 03:51 local government, university, kind of interesting.
• 03:54 And so I really recommend that you spend a few minutes kind of looking through this
• 03:58 website, looking through the other website I just showed you,
• 04:02 and becoming familiar with places where you could find good data sets.
• 04:06 Because while we're learning, it's just so important to get good data.
• 04:08 And it just makes it so
• 04:09 much easier to learn if you find data about a topic that you're interested in.
• 04:13 So I recommend following along with this course and
• 04:16 using the same data set that I'm going to use.
• 04:17 But after you get done with the course and you try something else on your own,
• 04:20 come back through here, kind of look for something that catches your eye, and
• 04:23 download it and take a look at it and play with it and see what it is.
• 04:26 So that's all for this video.
• 04:27 In the next video, we're going to go ahead and download the specific
• 04:32 data set that we're going to use throughout the rest of the course, and
• 04:36 that'll be in the next video.

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.