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)

Using fixed LOD calculations for grouping data

Level of Detail or LOD calculations are calculation expressions that have been available in Tableau Desktop for some time. An LOD calculation allows you to aggregate your data at different levels of granularity within a single dataset.

For example, you might have a dataset with customer orders, where each row represents a single line item in an order. You might want to aggregate revenue by order, or by customer, without losing the granularity of your data. This is where LOD calculations come into play. In this recipe, you'll create an LOD calculation. In doing so, you'll group your data into distinct buckets and aggregate values in a single step.

Getting ready

To follow along with this recipe, download the Sample Files 4.3 folder from this book's GitHub repository. You must have Tableau Prep version 2020.1 or greater to leverage the LOD functionality.

How to do it…

Start by opening Tableau Prep and...