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)

Forecasting time series using R

In the previous two recipes, Preparing Tableau Prep to work with R and Embedding R code in a Tableau Prep flow, you learned how to set up R, RStudio, and Rserve, as well as integrating an R script into Tableau Prep. The example script used was relatively basic and required no additional configuration. However, R is an extensible programming language, and many functions are bundled in what are called packages. In this recipe, we'll look at a more advanced script that has dependencies on such packages. You'll learn how to prepare R for these complex scripts that require additional preparation.

Getting ready

To follow along with this recipe, download the Sample Files 8.3 folder from this book's GitHub repository.

Important note

The R scripts in this book serve to illustrate the process of integrating R and Tableau Prep. Each dataset must be carefully analyzed prior to applying advanced functionality such as forecasting. The script...