Changing Names In The Data Source

Quick reference

• 00:04 All right, in this video, I want to spend a couple minutes talking about changing
• 00:08 the names of these fields right here.
• 00:10 Now, we kind of brushed on this earlier when we went over here and
• 00:14 we changed the name.
• 00:16 So we've got color, we can come up here and click Rename, and
• 00:19 I could change this to Dog Color, for instance.
• 00:22 Hit Enter, and boom, now it has changed to Dog Color.
• 00:25 If we come over to our sheet, you'll notice, it's also been updated here.
• 00:32 And that's really just what I want to point out in this video.
• 00:34 Not super important, but very interesting, something you should be aware of.
• 00:37 If you change something in the data source, it will also change right here.
• 00:44 Likewise, we can change this back.
• 00:46 So I can click on this caret, come down here to Rename.
• 00:49 If I want to change this back to Color, or if I want to change it to Colors,
• 00:54 I could change this, hit Enter, okay, it changes there, no big deal.
• 00:58 But now when we come back to our data source,
• 01:00 you'll notice it's also changed here in the actual data source.
• 01:04 So very important to sort of understand that when you make a change here,
• 01:08 it also reflects back in your worksheet, and vice versa, so that's kind of cool.
• 01:13 Now this actually will not save to your actual data source.
• 01:18 So the actual CSV file that we downloaded, that hasn't been changed.
• 01:21 In fact, we can head back over here very quickly,
• 01:25 and I can just open our dog data again.
• 01:29 And you'll notice it says Color right there, it does not say Colors.
• 01:34 Or if I go ahead and close this again to make it more dramatic,
• 01:38 we can close this, do I want to save it, no.
• 01:42 Let's head over to our worksheet, and let's change this
• 01:47 to, Dog Color.
• 01:53 So it's updated here, we head back over to our data source, it's updated there.
• 01:59 But if we open up our Excel one more time, You see, it's still just Color there.
• 02:07 It is not updated in the Excel spreadsheet.
• 02:09 So just keep that in mind.
• 02:11 I know a lot of times, people make changes in Tableau and
• 02:14 then expect it to be updated in the CSV file later on, and it's not.
• 02:18 And that could potentially cause problems if, later on,
• 02:21 you're opening up that data source in another Tableau worksheet and
• 02:24 it hasn't changed and you expected it to change.
• 02:27 So just sort of keep that in mind.
• 02:29 Also kind of neat that you can update it here, and
• 02:34 it will change back here on your data source screen, so that's kind of cool.
• 02:41 You notice, if we come to our measure and try to change the name,
• 02:48 We can't really change the name for that because this measure is a count.
• 02:54 It has been created by Tableau.
• 02:56 Tableau looked at the data and said, you know what,
• 02:59 they're probably going to want a count of these.
• 03:01 So it's generated it for us, this is not an actual column in our data source.
• 03:06 If we come back over here and look, license type, breed, dog color, dog name,
• 03:10 owner zip, expiration year, and valid date, there is no count column, right?
• 03:15 So there's nothing to change there, so just sort of keep that in mind.
• 03:18 So that's all for this video.
• 03:19 In the next video, we'll talk briefly about converting measures to dimensions.

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