New to Tableau Prep Builder? Start with these five fundamentals

Tableau Prep Builder helps everyone quickly and confidently combine, shape, and clean their data for analysis. With all the features available in Tableau Prep Builder, you may ask yourself, where do I start?

We sat down with Tableau Prep product managers, Arthur Gyldenege, Anushka Anand, and Isaac Kunen to review some fundamental features that will help you build a solid baseline for approaching flows in Tableau Prep Builder: pivoting, group and replace, join and union, aggregations, and filtering.

Pivoting

Pivoting helps you take wide, short tables and turn them into tall, skinny tables that make them easy to analyze in Tableau. Tableau Prep Builder makes pivoting visual, allowing you to see how your data changes with every step. Learn more about pivoting your data in Tableau Prep Builder.

Group and Replace

A common issue that arises when cleaning data is the presence of multiple values that should be a single value (such as GB and Great Britain). To deal with this in Tableau Prep Builder, leverage the group and replace feature in a cleaning step. This feature allows you to group multiple values and replace them with a single value—essentially realiasing. For more information on how to group and replace values in Tableau Prep Builder, watch the free training video.

Join and Union

With Tableau Prep Builder, there are two main ways to combine your data—unions and joins. Watch the free training videos on joins and unions for additional resources:

• Joining is a method for combining related data in two or more tables based on common fields. In Tableau Prep Builder, you can view details of a join (including join clause and join type) or modify a join in the Join Configuration Pane.
• Unioning is a method to combine data from multiple tables by bringing in new rows or records that match the structure of the original data (that is, the fields or columns are the same). In Tableau Prep Builder, you can use a wildcard union in the Input Step to union tables with the exact same structure or schema. Or you can add a Union Step to your flow when you have two or more inputs that you need to union together.

Aggregation

Aggregating your data helps you change the level of detail of a file or a table, and this makes it easier to combine with other files and tables. Aggregate values in Tableau Prep Builder using the Aggregate Step. You can track the results of this step in the profile pane and if you decide you want to keep more of the original fields, you can click back into the Aggregate Step and add them to the Grouped Fields area. Learn more about how to aggregate and group values in Tableau Prep Builder.

Filtering

While preparing data for analysis, you often need to filter out unwanted values or restrict the range of data you're prepping. Tableau Prep Builder has rich filter experiences to filter ranges of numbers or dates. You can filter values using a variety of methods: use a calculation filter, a range of values filter, a range of dates filter, or a relative data filter. Add a filter by simply clicking a drop-down arrow in the profile pane.

More ways to learn Tableau Prep Builder

Become a master in Tableau Prep Builder with free training videos or instructor-led training. For more information, check out these resources:

• Download to try Tableau Prep Builder
• Learn Tableau Prep Builder with this list of resources
• Best practices for tidy data using Tableau Prep