During our first week at the Data School, I was introduced to an user friendly data prepping tool called Tableau Prep. Analysts often have to do a lot of mental gymnastics when prepping data in Excel but Tableau Prep’s smart interface streamlines a lot of the data cleansing process. In this blog, I wanted to highlight the ways that data processing can be easier for people who are accustomed to Excel but would like to try their hand at another program. Tableau Prep’s interface includes:
Connection Pane:
- Allows users to connect to one or more data sources
Flow Pane:
- Provides a visual representation for manipulating the structure of the data. Icons are used to represent operations that are applied to the data like pivoting data, joining data, creating aggregations, or outputting data.
- Analysts can easily build workflows and track their process on the flow plane
- Users can change icon colors to easily track and label their workflows
Profile Pane
- Provides a toolbar on the top that lets you clean and change your data. You can rearrange the order of your column, sort or split fields, fix or find null values, rename headers, clean up misspellings, or change incorrect data entries.
- A changes pane tracks the changes you made to the data and allows you to edit the changes you made.
- You can see the results from joins and unions through clever color coding. After a join or an union, a colored bar will appear under the header to show you where the input was originally from
Data Grid
- Provides row level details of your dataset. You can see the impact of your operations on your dataset in the data grid.
Tableau Prep’s design is similar to Tableau and can be easily picked up if you’re already familiar with Tableau. The program has predictive modeling and will make suggestions during your data cleansing process that can speed up your data cleaning process. The program is highly scalable as it doesn’t require a lot of technical skills. When I was first learning this program, I found the challenges in Preppin’ Data super helpful for understanding the program. Here are some of the things that are typically be done in Excel but can be easily executed by Tableau Prep:
Combining Multiple Data Sources:
You can union multiple files at the start of your input. Under tables, there’s an option to include multiple files in your input.
Cleaning Data:
The profile pane lets you easily clean your data by renaming fields, changing data types, and removing unwanted fields. Users can easily see the changes reflected in their data in the data grid below.
Pivoting:
The pivot function in tableau lets you select between column to row or rows to column with just a drop down menu. The pivot results window allows you to see the results of your pivot based on the fields you chose to pivot. Users can test out multiple fields before they actually decide to pivot their data.
Splitting:
Auto split will split the data into two columns with a common separator. With a custom split, users can pick the separator and choose to split the values at the first "n" occurrence of the separator, the last "n" occurrences or at all occurrences.
Aggregation:
If users want to apply a mathematical function to reduce granularity, the aggregation function allows users to group and aggregate fields to achieve their desired outcome. Sum, average, median, and count distinct are just some of the aggregation that’s available with the aggregation function.
Joining:
When you’re joining, Tableau will automatically join on a similar key. Users can add multiple joins and also see the total number of fields that are generated from that join. In the join results pane, each column is color coordinated with the color of their original dataset so you can see where the data in the join originated from.
If you would like to give Tableau Prep a try, all my examples are from 2021 week 4.This concludes my brief introduction to Tableau Prep. I hope this blog will inspire readers to leave their comfort zone and try out other data prepping tools like Tableau Prep or Alteryx!