Union tables from multiple connections/workbooks

Question

I'm looking to create a union tables from multiple workbooks (connections) into 1 continuous table. The tables and their headers are identical, we just have files for each year worth of sales and I'm trying to analyze the sales year over year.

The official statement from Tableau is

You can union your data to combine two or more tables by appending values (rows) from one table to another. To union your data in Tableau data source, the tables must come from the same connection.

Source to Tableau's statement

And I'm curious if anyone has found a work around for this. This isn't asking what a union is, but how I can achieve this from multiple connection (or if there's a way to have a single connection to multiple workbooks, but I doubt it).

I created a new union, but it seems to be limited to only one connection; however, the tables I intend to union are from different spreadsheets, and therefore different connections. This seems to be what I'd imagine to be a very basic function that I'm sure there's something I'm missing.

Answer 1

If you connect to your excel or csv workbook then select the New Union option on the left you can see a bunch of options for doing this in the Wildcard(automatic) tab. You can wildcard .csv or .xlsx so that Tableau will union all of those files together in one datasource.