When I think about preparing data, I instantly think about battling fields that contain string data. Customer names, product descriptions, messages, and geographic names are all strings that you will likely need to manipulate when you prepare your data for analysis. This chapter will cover what a string is and how it differs from numbers. Having that background will allow you to further explore working with string data fields through both calculations and Prep Builder’s built-in functionality.
What Do We Mean by Strings?
When most people think of data, they think about the measures we are summing, averaging, or finding the minimum and maximum of. But those measures don’t tell us much until we start analyzing things at different levels—for example, average sales by region or total sales per company.
Strings are often those dimensions by which we categorize data in tools like Tableau Desktop. Tableau indicates strings with the Abc icon (Figure 9-1).
Figure 9-1. String fields in Tableau are indicated by the Abc icon
String data fields are the most flexible in terms of the values they can hold. Typically, they can contain everything from A through Z and 0 through 9 as well as punctuation and most other characters. With that flexibility, though, also comes pain, as the variety of values can create headaches for you as you prepare your data.
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month, and much more.
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
