2 Replies Latest reply on Feb 6, 2019 10:50 AM by Michael Gillespie

    Connecting a data dictionary to data

    Tyler Griesenbrock
    Tyler Griesenbrock Feb 6, 2019 10:32 AM

      I'm new to Tableau, and I'm having trouble connecting two data files. One is the data data dictionary for my project, stored as an Excel file, while the other is the data itself, stored as a CSV. A simplified example:

       

      Data dictionary:

      Question textAnswer choicesVariable name
      What is your favorite fruit?Any textFruit
      How many apples do you eat per week?Any numberApples
      When did you last eat an apple?Any date in mm/dd/yyyy formatLast_apple

       

      Data:

      Respondent IDFruitApplesLast_apple
      1Bananas102/01/2019
      2Apples302/05/2019
      3Oranges012/26/2018

       

      I'm hoping to link these two data sets so I can display the survey results alongside the associated question, and I thought that because they share common variable names, I would be able to do this. However, Tableau appears to be interpreting the data dictionary as additional rows of data, and when it tries to put a string in what is currently a measure field, it throws errors. (For example, it appears to be trying to create another respondent whose answer to variable name "Apples" is "How many apples do you eat per week?") How can I associate the question text with each variable name in the data set? Transposing the axes in the Excel file didn't seem to help.