Tableau Prep is a powerful data preparation tool that allows users to clean, transform, and enrich their data, making it ready for analysis and visualization in Tableau. Preparing your data in Tableau Prep can be a crucial step in the data analysis process, as it ensures that your data is accurate and organized, making it easier to work with and analyse.

One of the first steps in preparing your data in Tableau Prep is to connect to your data source. Tableau Prep supports a wide range of data sources, including files such as Excel and CSV, databases, and cloud services like Google Sheets and Salesforce. Once connected to your data source, you can preview and explore your data to better understand its structure and content.

Next, you can start cleaning and transforming your data. This is where the simplicity of Tableau Prep's friendly "no-code" user interface comes in. Tableau Prep provides a range of tools in a simple drop-down by clicking on the plus sign next to your imported data source.

Within the "Clean Step" option is where a lot of a user's preparation will begin. The "Clean Step" includes a range of tools that can help the end user clean and manipulate data, including filtering your data, intelligently or manually splitting data into multiple fields, replacing data, removing duplicates, or renaming fields in your data source. Additionally, the clean step allows for simple reordering and type coding of your columns. This ensures that your data is ready for manipulation and investigation once begin your visualisation process.

Once your data is in the correct format, within the clean step, the user can then begin creating new fields with calculations, utilizing the same coding syntax as tableau. One of the most powerful parts of Tableau prep is the changes tab. Each change the user makes within the clean step is recorded within the changes tab. Within the changes tab, the user can see each of the steps that were taken to arrive at the current data source. They can delete or edit previous steps, or roll the data source back to a historic change.

After you have made the required changes to your data within the clean step, tableau provides several other steps as required, including transformations, joins, pivots, and aggregations. After you have prepared your data in Tableau Prep, you can save and output it in a format that is compatible with Tableau. You can save your data as a file, such as a CSV or Excel file, or you can publish it directly to Tableau Server or Tableau Online, making it accessible and shareable with others.

Overall, preparing your data in Tableau Prep can save you time and effort, and help you to get the most out of your data. Whether you are working with large or small datasets, Tableau Prep provides the tools and features you need to clean, transform, and enrich your data, making it ready for analysis and visualization in Tableau.

Click here to read Chapter 1: An Introduction to why we Prepare Data.

Click here to read Chapter 2: An Introduction to Preparing Data in Alteryx