Book Image

Mastering Tableau 2021 - Third Edition

By : Marleen Meier, David Baldwin
Book Image

Mastering Tableau 2021 - Third Edition

By: Marleen Meier, David Baldwin

Overview of this book

Tableau is one of the leading business intelligence (BI) tools that can help you solve data analysis challenges. With this book, you will master Tableau's features and offerings in various paradigms of the BI domain. Updated with fresh topics including Quick Level of Detail expressions, the newest Tableau Server features, Einstein Discovery, and more, this book covers essential Tableau concepts and advanced functionalities. Leveraging Tableau Hyper files and using Prep Builder, you’ll be able to perform data preparation and handling easily. You’ll gear up to perform complex joins, spatial joins, unions, and data blending tasks using practical examples. Next, you’ll learn how to execute data densification and further explore expert-level examples to help you with calculations, mapping, and visual design using Tableau extensions. You’ll also learn about improving dashboard performance, connecting to Tableau Server and understanding data visualization with examples. Finally, you'll cover advanced use cases such as self-service analysis, time series analysis, and geo-spatial analysis, and connect Tableau to Python and R to implement programming functionalities within it. By the end of this Tableau book, you’ll have mastered the advanced offerings of Tableau 2021 and be able to tackle common and advanced challenges in the BI domain.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
16
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17
Index

The Tableau Prep Builder GUI

User experience is an important topic, not only when you build a dashboard but also when you use other aspects of Tableau. One of the biggest selling points of Tableau is and has always been the ease of using the GUI, and is only one of the reasons Tableau is a much-loved tool by its customers.

The Tableau Prep Builder GUI has two important canvases to look at. Right after you have connected data to Tableau Prep Builder, the workspace will split into several parts:

Figure 3.4: Prep workspace sections

Let's look at what we can see from the preceding screenshot:

  • A: The connection pane, showing you the input files available at the location selected.
  • B: The flow pane, which shows your current Prep flow. This always starts with an input step.
  • C: The input pane settings, which give you several options to configure your input.
  • D: The input pane samples, showing the fields you moved to the connection pane, including...