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)

Validating data with a custom reference list

Tableau Prep provides out-of-the-box data validation data roles for email addresses, URLs, and a variety of geographic fields. However, the real power of data roles comes from creating custom data roles specific to your environment and data. In this recipe, we'll create a custom data role and publish it to Tableau Server or Tableau Online. By leveraging your server, the custom data role can be made available to your colleagues, ensuring everyone is using a single reference list.

Getting ready

To follow along with this recipe, download the Sample Files 3.5 folder from this book's GitHub repository. In this recipe, we'll create a custom data role, for which you will need to be signed in to your instance of Tableau Server or Tableau Online.

How to do it…

Open up Tableau Prep and connect to the User List.csv file from the Sample Files 3.5 folder and follow the steps:

  1. To assign a data role to any field...