Tableau Prep: Up & Running

Chapter 43. Deciding Where to Prepare Your Data

Like many software providers in the data landscape, Tableau doesn’t just have one tool where you do every task. Frankly, such a tool would be either crazily complex to work with or incomplete in terms of functionality the user needs. Having multiple tools available within the Tableau platform does pose another question, though: Where should you complete certain processes?

Processes to Consider

Data preparation comes down to a number of key steps:

1. Inputting data

2. Joining/unioning multiple data sets

3. Pivoting

4. Cleaning

5. Aggregating

6. Outputting data

Each step could be appropriate for lots of hypothetical situations, but in reality, the majority of them should take place in the data preparation tool. Joins, unions, and pivots are common tasks at the data prep stage, and end users of the data set should be spared that complexity in Desktop. While flexibility might be required in some cases (specific visualization styles, for example, demand a different data structure), the majority of data sets have a relatively standard setup for analysis.

This leaves cleaning (including calculations) and aggregations as two processes that may fit in either the data preparation tool or the visualization tool. With small data sets and simple calculations, which approach is “best” is more ambiguous. However, as the size of the data set or the complexity of the calculations grows, your decision here might determine how successfully your organization ...