In all the hype about big data, we have to acknowledge that some of us have “wee” data. Not every organization has a fully-built out Information Systems department or Business Intelligence team with access to petabytes of data and the latest tools like Hadoop and Alteryx. Some of us are still running on legacy hardware and software, have tiny budgets, part-time staff, and thousands or tens of thousands of records that we want to analyze vs. billions.
My day job is in the latter camp. For all that US healthcare includes the latest treatments and technology, healthcare IT has historically been behind the times. My desktop is running Windows XP SP3, Office 2007 is our productivity tool, Microsoft Access is our most commonly used database, and Tableau is our go-to choice for data visualization (so there’s at least one area where we’re we’ve got current technology).
Every couple-few months I get a question about Microsoft Access and Tableau, I thought I’d take a few minutes to combine my answers into one post, so read on for what I know about integrating Access and Tableau.