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)

Creating a flow for transaction analytics

In this recipe, we'll create a data pipeline, or flow, for analytics. In this scenario, we'll assume that we are an analyst for a fictive department store with multiple physical stores, as well as an online store front. We will be presented with multiple data sources that need to be combined, cleaned, and transformed so that we can output a clean and reliable dataset of all transactions that occurred in the first six months of 2020. This is a common scenario in most industries and is the perfect use case for Tableau Prep.

Getting ready

To follow along with this recipe, download the Sample Files 9.1 folder from this book's GitHub repository. In here you'll find various data files. Several of these files originate from disparate systems and we'll need to employ Tableau Prep to provide a single, holistic output of all transactions.

The contents of the files are as follows:

  • Files starting with OnlineSales...