Tableau Prep: Up & Running

Chapter 50. Final Thoughts

Self-service data preparation enables those working with data to answer their own questions when they want to. Hopefully, after reading this book, you have discovered that Tableau Prep Builder is a great tool for preparing and working with data. In this chapter, I’d like to offer a few final thoughts from my experience of teaching people how to work with their data.

One aspect I mentioned early on was planning your preparation. As you gain experience, you might be tempted to skip this step, but planning allows you to periodically sanity-check what you are trying to achieve. Planning also gives you the opportunity to take your preparation further by adding beneficial data that you wouldn’t have discovered otherwise. Inevitably, you will face some difficult challenges that need to be broken down and structured. A quick sketch can go a long way toward helping you formulate the best solution and make it a lasting one.

Prep Builder’s simplicity makes it not just a great introduction to data preparation but also a product you can continue to use as you gain experience and take on even more challenges. Prep Builder has a lot of deep functionality that can help you tackle those tougher problems. Once a solution is in place, you can easily automate it by combining Prep Builder with Prep Conductor. With the time you save, you can work more on the actual analysis or on tackling additional data problems. Prep Builder’s ease of documentation alone creates significant ...