Editing the Connection

When a Tableau workbook is connected to a data source, you can edit the connection. You might want to edit the data source connection to:

• Specify a new location for the data source. Suppose the name or location of a data source you were using has changed and is no longer available using the previous connection information. In this case, you can direct the workbook to the correct location without losing your work.
• Apply analyses created using one data source to another data source.

Suppose you create a workbook containing an several views involving markets, products, sales, and profits and you want to apply the analyses to a new data source. Instead of recreating each view from scratch, you can edit the original data connection and specify a new data source.

Editing a Connection

1. Select a data source on the Data menu and then select Edit Connection.
2. Complete the data source-specific connection dialog box. For example, the Microsoft Access Connection dialog box is shown below. You can specify a new file, or you can select a different table to analyze.
   

Replacing Field References

When you successfully connect to a new data source, all worksheets that previously referred to the original data source now refer to the new data source. If the new data source does not have the same field names that are used in the original workbook, the fields become invalid and are marked with an exclamation mark . You can quickly resolve the problem by replacing the field’s references.

For example, say you have a workbook connected to a data source that contains a Product Category field. Then you edit the connection to point to a new data source that has all the same data but instead of Product Category, the field name has been changed to Product Type. The Product Category field remains in the Data window but is marked as invalid. To make the field valid, you can replace the references, which means you can map the invalid field to a valid field in new data source (e.g., Product Category corresponds to Product Type).

1. Right-click the invalid field in the Data window and select Replace References.
2. In the Replace References dialog box, select a field from the new data source that corresponds to the invalid field.