I was having a lovely conversation with a colleague a few days ago describing how well a weekly Client Project had gone - I'd been doing the data prep, and there was a wonderful moment when despite it having looked awful all week, I finally pressed the Pivot button, and it all fell into place beautifully. Except, it wasn't a lovely conversation, because I suddenly remembered that we'd be using Power BI and of course Power BI doesn't call it pivoting, and being the pedant that I am I spent a good thirty seconds trying to remember what Power BI does call it before I let myself move on. So here's a table, for pivoting, and transposing, and joining, and all the other terminologies that different bits of software just can't seem to agree on:
Tableau Prep | Alteryx | PowerQuery | Oh, and also... |
---|---|---|---|
Join |
Join | Merge | |
Union | Union | Append | Alteryx also has a tool called Append, but it's different. |
Pivot: Columns to Rows | Transpose | Unpivot Column | PowerQuery also has a Transpose function; again. it's different. |
Pivot: Rows to Columns | Cross-Tab | Pivot Column |
Simple, right?