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)

Determining granularity

One key consideration that is often overlooked is determining the granularity of the data that's needed. For example, when working with geographic data, you may have values for continent, region, country, state, city, ZIP code, street, and so on. But if you're only going to report on country data, you may not need all those other dimensions. Or perhaps you are processing order data; you may want to consider whether you need the details for each individual line item in each individual order – maybe your analysis will be fine with just the total order amount per day. In this recipe, we'll look at a quick method to help reveal the data actually in use in a Tableau Desktop visualization.

Getting ready

To follow along with this recipe, download the Sample Files 4.1 folder from this book's GitHub repository.

How to do it…

Start by opening the Superstore.tflx flow from the Sample Files 4.1 folder in Tableau Prep, then...