00:00So let's talk a bit more about text file configuration.
00:04Text files require additional configuration in the Settings tab to determine how they will be ingested.
00:10You'll notice that when we're connecting to a text file, it will look a bit different than our databases or Excel files,
00:16because by default, text files have delimiters and other mitigating factors that we'll need to consider when we're ingesting the data.
00:24If we look at our text configuration, we'll see that there are a bunch of different options that we can choose.
00:28Let's talk a little bit about each option and their benefits.
00:33The first line contains header option is the default and pulls the first row of your dataset in as headers.
00:39As we saw before, this can often not be the case.
00:43We may have extra rows at the top of our CSV or text files that will make our headers look strange.
00:49If this is the case, we'll want to change over to generate field names automatically.
00:54This will generate generic headers for our table, which we can rename at a later time.
01:00Generic headers will start with F, so F1, F2, F3, etc.
01:06Field separators will give a character dropdown to choose from for a field delimiter for our file.
01:11This can be anything from a comma, to a pipe, to a dash, or anything else that can delimit our data.
01:19This will be an important factor because not all text files are delimited with the same characters.
01:24Note that choosing Other for this option will allow for a custom delimiter.
01:29In addition to field separators, we'll also have text qualifiers.
01:32These select the characters that enclose the values in a file.
01:36Oftentimes, you'll see these as either single or double quotes.
01:39Note that this defaults to automatic and gives a single quote, a double quote, or none as your options.
01:46It's best to leave this as automatic unless your data is coming in incorrectly.
01:51Additionally, you can also choose the character set.
01:55These select the character sets that describe the file encoding.
01:58Most often, this is set to something like UTF-8, but if you have something custom, it should be in the dropdown list.
02:05Finally, you can customize your locale.
02:07Locale sets the geographic location to parse the file.
02:11This is a very important factor, especially when working with international data.
02:16When pulling data from different countries into your data set, you may have differences in dates, currency, and your decimals and thousands separators.
02:25This can drastically impact how your data is ingested and the general cleanliness of the data.
02:30So you'll want to get your locale right, right off the bat, in your input.
02:34Note that text file inputs don't have data interpreter, so you'll need to clean your data more inside a separate cleaning step that comes after input.
02:42Now that we've talked high-level about text file configuration, let's jump into Tableau Prep and take a look at our data.
02:50All right, so we're back in Tableau Prep, and we can see that we've changed or modified each of our inputs except for the last.
02:56This is our CSV input for our workflow.
03:00Let's take a look at some of the options that we just discussed.
03:03Now we can see that this is a standard CSV file, so we'll want our field separators to stay as comma, but again, we could change this to automatic or any of these other options.
03:13We can see that neither our first line or generate field names automatically is giving us a good option for our headers.
03:21For now, we'll leave this as generate field names automatically, and we'll clean that up in our cleaning step, which we'll cover in a later lesson.
03:29Looking at our text qualifiers, we'll leave this as automatic, and it should pick that up just fine.
03:35We know that our data is stored as UTF-8, but you can see there are a myriad of options that you can choose from.
03:41And our locale is English-United States for this data set.
03:46Note that there is another option inside the Settings tab called Incremental Refresh, and we'll cover that in a later lesson.
03:53All right, now that we've got our settings taken care of, let's go ahead and save our workflow.
03:59And up next, we'll be talking about data sampling.
