Refreshing a data source and dealing with changes

Data lives and changes. Any analysis tool, such as Tableau, needs to allow users to refresh data and deal with changes as easily as possible.

Note

In this section, we won't talk about the published data source on Tableau Server. The way in which to refresh or modify a published data source is different and is explained in more detail in Chapter 8, Publishing and Interacting in Tableau Server.

The following section describes how to refresh a data source.

How to refresh a data source

Refreshing a data source is simple for both Live and Extract data sources.

For a Live connection, right-click on the data source and click on Refresh—that's it!

For an Extract, clicking on Refresh won't work because the extracted data (in the hyper file) hasn't changed. Remember that when you create an Extract, you create a copy of your dataset. To refresh an Extract data source, you first need to refresh the extracted data. To do so, right...