Chapter 49. Evaluating Whether You Need Prep Builder at All
We all overthink things sometimes, and it happens a lot in data preparation. Once you have honed your skills, it can be easy to overthink the data and take steps you simply don’t need. This chapter will cover when you can use Tableau Desktop to complete the data preparation process and situations where Prep Builder is the better choice.
A History of Data Preparation in Tableau
Back in 2010, when I was trying Tableau Public for the first time in version 5.2 and becoming a heavy user of Desktop version 7 onward, completing your data preparation in Tableau was tough unless you were doing very simple use cases. Prep Builder was just a glint in the eye of the Tableau developers at that point.
Common data prep tasks had to happen outside of Tableau Desktop for a number of reasons, like performance (slower processing speeds), but it was the lack of functionality that caused the most significant issues. Users often had to use external tools to complete tasks. The Tableau Excel add-in extension (see the top right of Figure 49-1) was the principal way to pivot data from columns to rows. This was very useful for dealing with survey data and dates held in separate columns (i.e., data that’s not Tableau friendly, as covered in Chapter 4).
Figure 49-1. The Tableau Excel add-in extension
Complex joins, data removal, and unions were ...
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