New in Tableau Prep: Reuse steps and cleaning operations, and highlight flows

The holidays are just around the corner and we have some new features to help you kick off the season on the right foot! Let’s face it, data prep can sometimes be redundant, and you often do some of the same work across your flow. In the December release of Tableau Prep (2018.3.3), we are giving you the ability to reuse steps and cleaning operations. And with flow highlighting, it’s now easier to troubleshoot your flow when you select a field in the profile pane.

All this goodness is in addition to an improvement to input unions that will now automatically detect new files and include them in the union. And to top it all off, we have a few stocking stuffers in the form of new quick cleaning operations. You asked for it and we delivered because ‘tis the season for data prep!

Have you ever written a long, complex calculation that you needed to use elsewhere in your flow? Now, if you want to reuse a step, simply copy and paste it into an empty space in the flow. Then go into ‘Changes’ and reapply each change to the correct field using drag and drop. You can even reuse a single change. Just copy the change and paste it into ‘Changes’ for the step where you want to apply it and then drag and drop. You can reuse any cleaning operation—including the new quick cleaning operations we added this release—to remove extra or all white spaces. Gone are the days when you had to do duplicate work to clean your data. It’s now as easy as copy, paste, drag, and drop!

Troubleshooting your flow is an important part of your data cleaning process. Flow highlighting will allow you to understand a field in the context of your whole flow. When you select a field in any step, Tableau Prep highlights the steps where that field exists and the relevant annotations associated with changes made to that field.

As the year comes to an end, we want to take a moment to thank all of you, our incredible customers! Since launching Tableau Prep in April, we’ve released seven upgrade releases. Our ability to innovate and move quickly wouldn’t be possible without you. We appreciate your feedback and willingness to engage with us. Happy holidays and see you in 2019!

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• See a full list of what’s new in this release
• See what we added in the previous release
• List of resources for learning Tableau Prep