Book Image

Tableau Prep Cookbook

By : Hendrik Kleine
Book Image

Tableau Prep Cookbook

By: Hendrik Kleine

Overview of this book

Tableau Prep is a tool in the Tableau software suite, created specifically to develop data pipelines. This book will describe, in detail, a variety of scenarios that you can apply in your environment for developing, publishing, and maintaining complex Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) data pipelines. The book starts by showing you how to set up Tableau Prep Builder. You’ll learn how to obtain data from various data sources, including files, databases, and Tableau Extracts. Next, the book demonstrates how to perform data cleaning and data aggregation in Tableau Prep Builder. You’ll also gain an understanding of Tableau Prep Builder and how you can leverage it to create data pipelines that prepare your data for downstream analytics processes, including reporting and dashboard creation in Tableau. As part of a Tableau Prep flow, you’ll also explore how to use R and Python to implement data science components inside a data pipeline. In the final chapter, you’ll apply the knowledge you’ve gained to build two use cases from scratch, including a data flow for a retail store to prepare a robust dataset using multiple disparate sources and a data flow for a call center to perform ad hoc data analysis. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to create, run, and publish Tableau Prep flows and implement solutions to common problems in data pipelines.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Filtering your dataset

When preparing your data for analysis, it's good practice to provide the least amount of data required to perform that analysis. Our data inputs frequently contain data that is not required and that you may want to remove immediately during an input step.

Alternatively, you may transform your data in a Tableau Prep flow, and as a result, a field may become redundant at some point after the input step itself.

In Tableau Prep, there are three methods you can use to filter your data. In this recipe, we'll perform filter actions using all three methods: calculation filters, selected values filters, and regular filters.

Getting ready

To follow along with this recipe, download the Sample Files 3.2 folder from this book's GitHub repository.

How to do it…

Open up Tableau Prep Builder and connect to the Superstore Sales.hyper extract file, then follow the steps:

  1. With an input step, the only method to filter our data is...