Connecting to data

If you are familiar with Tableau Desktop, Prep will be an easy game for you. The handling and interfaces are very similar, and connecting to data, if the connector is available in Prep, works the same whether it’s a text file, a database, or an extract. At first sight, you might not even notice a difference between Prep and the Tableau Desktop GUIs, which provides the handy advantage that you can start prepping right away.

To get started, begin by opening Prep and click on + to open a file. The following screen will appear:

Figure 3.1: Connecting to data

From the preceding screenshot, we can see that you can choose the type of data you want to connect to in the search bar. Just as in Tableau, the repertoire of Prep includes multiple databases.

Now let’s connect to a dataset with a practical exercise. For this exercise, we need the following dataset: https://www.kaggle.com/airbnb/boston. Please download calendar.csv, listings.csv...