Prepare Your Data for Tableau: A Practical Guide to the Tableau Data Prep Tool

© Tim Costello, Lori Blackshear 2020

T. Costello, L. BlackshearPrepare Your Data for Tableauhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-5497-4_1

1. What Is ETL?

Tim Costello¹  and Lori Blackshear²

(1)

Euless, TX, USA

(2)

Fort Worth, TX, USA

 

ETL is an acronym for Extract/Transform and Load. ETL is the engine that drives your visual analytics. Without ETL you would be limited to the shape (existing layout) of the data you start with. In many cases this is OK, but as you progress in visual analytics, you will find yourself wanting to combine data sources, combine fields within data sources, or maybe even break some individual fields out into multiple fields. You might want to replace some abbreviations or codes out into the values they represent. You will certainly ...