Download Dog Registration DataSet and Open With Tableau

Quick reference

• 00:04 All right, in this video,
• 00:05 we're going to download our data set and then open it in Tableau.
• 00:07 And in the last video, I said we're going to get our data from data.gov.
• 00:10 And actually, since the last video,
• 00:13 data.gov has dropped the data that we were going to use.
• 00:16 So it's a very common thing for websites like this that aggregate data sets,
• 00:20 they come and go.
• 00:21 So sort of be aware of that, is something important that you need to know.
• 00:24 If you find a data set at a website like this, it might not be there the next day.
• 00:29 So download it, save it to your computer.
• 00:31 If you need to share that with somebody else, and you tell them about it,
• 00:34 it might not be there when they go to look at it.
• 00:36 No big deal, this actually came from a government agency that we can go
• 00:39 straight to their website to get the data.
• 00:42 And also the dataset will be available for
• 00:44 download straight from the resource section of this course.
• 00:47 So you can download it there, or you can go to this website like I'm about to do.
• 00:50 So head over to https://data.wprdc.org/dataset,
• 00:55 and I'll put a link to that in the resource section as well.
• 01:01 And this is just the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center.
• 01:03 It's just a random government website where we can download data.
• 01:06 So I'm going to come over here and type in dog.
• 01:09 And you see we have Allegheny County Dog Licenses, that's what we want, and
• 01:13 click on that.
• 01:15 And scroll through here, there's a bunch of different ones,
• 01:17 we're going to use the 2018 one.
• 01:19 It's a little bit older, but we don't care about the age of these datasets,
• 01:22 we just want the data.
• 01:23 And so it's really cool, you could kind of look through here and see what to expect.
• 01:27 You can click on this to expand, there's different columns, license type,
• 01:31 breed color, dog name, owner's zip code, expiration year and valid date.
• 01:35 And this is the stuff we're going to get.
• 01:37 So, we can come up here and click on this to download it, which is the direct URL.
• 01:43 And we can save this file, now, save this to anywhere on your computer.
• 01:46 I'm just going to save it on my desktop.
• 01:48 And you notice this is a .csv file, it stands for comma-separated value.
• 01:52 It's a common spreadsheet file extension.
• 01:55 Now this is a really long, weird name, so
• 01:57 instead I'm just going to call this dog_data.
• 02:00 And name it anything you want, it really doesn't matter.
• 02:02 So let's go ahead and save this.
• 02:03 Now I'm on the Firefox web browser.
• 02:05 So up here in the top right hand corner,
• 02:06 you see this little blue arrow, that's where my downloads are.
• 02:09 If you're on Chrome, for
• 02:10 instance, the downloads are down here in the bottom left hand corner.
• 02:13 So wherever it is on your web browser, just go ahead and click it, and
• 02:15 we see here it is, dog_data.csv.
• 02:17 And if we want to open this in Excel, we can come over here and click Open.
• 02:25 Navigate to wherever you saved it, I saved it on my desktop right here.
• 02:30 And then we want to change this to text files.
• 02:35 Right here we can see .csv is one of the options.
• 02:38 So when we do that, we can just come down, find this file, here it is dog_data.csv.
• 02:43 And we can open this, now, we don't have to open this in Excel.
• 02:46 If you don't have Excel, don't worry about this, you can skip this step.
• 02:49 I'm just doing this so we can kind of look at this and
• 02:52 see that you can in fact open this in Excel if you want to.
• 02:55 So you can see we've got the license type, we've got the breeds, we got the colors,
• 03:00 the names.
• 03:00 TACODA, that's a great dog name, Tacoda.
• 03:04 So you can look at this if you want.
• 03:06 Now, absolutely you don't have to do this.
• 03:07 Like I said, you can skip this step if you don't have Excel.
• 03:10 But it's just kind of nice to look at your data before you import it into Tableau.
• 03:15 So now, that brings us to the next step, we can go ahead and close this,
• 03:19 and that's importing this into Tableau.
• 03:22 So go ahead and open Tableau, if you haven't opened it already,
• 03:25 go ahead and open it.
• 03:25 Go to your Windows Start menu, type in Tableau, icon will pop up, click on it,
• 03:28 and you're good to go.
• 03:29 Now what we want to do is sort of import that file into Tableau.
• 03:34 So what we want to do is Connect, over here on the left hand side,
• 03:38 and it says To a File.
• 03:39 Now, you may be tempted to click on Microsoft Excel.
• 03:43 That file we downloaded was not an Excel file.
• 03:46 Excel file is generally in .xlsx, we downloaded our file in .csv.
• 03:52 So that is actually just, in Tableau parlance, a text file.
• 03:56 So we can just click on text file.
• 03:59 And then navigate to our desktop where we saved it.
• 04:03 And then just kind of look for that file, and there it is, dog_data.
• 04:10 And boom, it pops right up.
• 04:12 So we're going to get into all of this in the coming videos.
• 04:14 But for now, we've downloaded our data.
• 04:16 We've sort of imported it into Tableau and we're ready to go.
• 04:20 So in the next video we'll start to explore this data source screen.

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.