Visual Analytics with Tableau

Chapter 10Data Preparation with Tableau Prep

So far, we have covered the most important aspects of creating and sharing data visualizations with Tableau, and I hope you have already been able to put some of them into practice with a dataset of your own.

However, in reality, datasets are not always as clean as the sample dataset we have used throughout this book. Further, data that is needed to answer a real‐world question may be spread out over several files or databases, and the tables could be aggregated at different levels.

Thus, before you can even start to look at your data, you may need to start the visual analytics process with another step: data preparation. For this, Tableau offers a stand‐alone tool called Tableau Prep, which has been on the market since April 2018. Tableau Prep's functionality far exceeds the basic data‐preparation capabilities of Tableau Desktop that you saw in Chapter 2.

With a visual approach similar to that in Tableau Desktop, Tableau Prep is intended to make data preparation accessible to business users who might not necessarily have a background in programming. The idea is that the time saved preparing data can be used more productively to visualize and analyze it.

For this reason, I thought it would be a good idea to conclude this book with an introduction to this new tool. Owners of a Tableau Creator key for Tableau Desktop can use the same license key to unlock an installation of Tableau Prep. As with Tableau Desktop, a 14‐day trial is also ...