Tableau Prep: Up & Running

Preface

Data is everywhere, but for most people it’s largely unusable for these key reasons:

• Some data is stored in databases hidden behind a coding language that the majority of the workforce have never been taught.

• Some data lurks on individuals’ computers stored away from those who might find it useful.

• Some data is held in formats that only the developer of the system that created it could read.

So why should you care about this? Frankly, that data holds the answers to questions you have and questions you have yet to even ask. Self-service data preparation is a skill that will change what data analyses you can undertake, reduce the time you need to complete data projects, and fundamentally improve the quality of your analyses.

This book aims to teach you how to access this data and turn it into information to answer those questions using one of the most user-intuitive tools on the market—Tableau Prep Builder. Released in April 2018 to support Tableau Desktop, Server, and Online users, Tableau Prep Builder enables you to turn messy data into a format where it can be analyzed in Tableau’s software. Tableau Desktop, Server, and Online are software platforms that make data easy to explore and analyze visually.

Previously, the largest gap in Tableau’s flow from source system to delivering insightful analysis was manipulating the data into a format that’s easy to use. Tableau, like the majority of business intelligence tools, requires the data to be “clean” and structured ...