In some cases, restructuring data at the source is not an option. The source may be secured and read-only. Or, you might not even have access to the original data and might be receiving periodic dumps of data in a specific format instead, which would be tedious to change each time. In such cases, there are techniques to deal with structural issues once you have connected to the data in Tableau.

We'll consider some examples of data structure issues to demonstrate some techniques to handle these issues in Tableau. None of the solutions are the "only right way" to resolve the given issue. Often, there are several approaches that might work. Take time to understand how the proposed solutions build on the foundational principals we considered in previous chapters.