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)

Grouping data

Grouping data in Tableau Prep can be done as part of the Aggregate step, as we've seen in the Aggregating values recipe earlier in this chapter. The function we'll review in this recipe is different, in that it can group values from a single field based on certain criteria.

As an example, values in a Name field might include John Smith and Smith, John. These might refer to the same person, and so we can group them together as John Smith. Performing this type of grouping is key to your data preparation efforts and ensures the downstream analysis does not run into issues with seemingly duplicate names.

Getting ready

To follow along with this recipe, download the Sample Files 4.4 folder from this book's GitHub repository.

How to do it…

Start by opening Tableau Prep and connect to the 2016 Sales.csv file from the Sample Files 4.4 folder in Tableau Prep, then follow these steps:

  1. Add a clean step to your flow and observe the values...