Best of the Tableau Web: Python for data prep with 2019.3 beta, JavaScript API, and WDCs

This month, Andy Cotgreave highlights the coders and developers who are blogging about inventive ways to extend the Tableau platform.


Welcome to the monthly round-up of Tableau-related blogs. As always, I’ve been enjoying reading blogs about your charts and calculations. This month, I wanted to highlight the coders and developers who are blogging about inventive ways to extend the Tableau platform. The Information Lab has great introductory posts about Web Data Connectors (WDC) and the JavaScript (JS) API. Also, Toan Hoang’s published guide to all the APIs you can play with is a helpful summary. If you’re looking to execute code in another language like Python, check out Toan’s introduction to using Python in Tableau.

Furthermore, did you know that coding is coming to Tableau Prep? The 2019.3 beta is out and you can run Python scripts in the application. This opens up lots of new approaches for data cleaning. Tom Christian from Tableau has a thorough introduction post to help you set up TabPy, how to start with a pandas dataframe then change the dataframe structure to whatever you want, and more. Josh Milligan’s two posts have loads of examples: One blog shares simple scripts to solve challenges they’ve encountered and Josh’s second blog is focused on fill down missing values, converting a string to Title Case, and counting business days between two specific dates.

Thanks, as always, to those writing such helpful blog posts and contributing to the data community—all of you coders and designers and hackers and scientists and researchers and analysts. Have a great summer and I’ll be back in September with the August round-up.