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)

Changing date formats with calculations

When you work with many different disparate systems, you're bound to run into a scenario where a date is formatted in such a way that it isn't recognized by Tableau Prep as a date. As a result, Tableau Prep will set the data type for such a field to a string. So, we don't lose any data, but we cannot perform any date functions on such a field. To resolve this, we can create a calculation to re-organize the date string so that the newly added field can be recognized as a date. In this recipe, we'll process a data file using Tableau Prep that holds a date field with values not recognized as a date by Tableau. During the process, we'll change the format of the field using a calculation so that Tableau will then correctly recognize the field as a date data type.

Getting ready

To follow along with this recipe, download the Sample Files 7.4 folder from this book's GitHub repository. There, you'll find the December...