In the first week at the data school, I got introduced to Tableau Prep for the first time and I learned the fundemental functions of this great tool. However, I learned that Tableau has several products not only Tableau Desktop and Prep and I am going to mention here the products’ names with a brief definition for each product:
· Tableau Desktop : mainly for visualizations.
· Tableau Server : it is a web based platform where you can save workbooks, data sources and other related Tableau Data.
· Tableau Public : A free online tool for visualizations with basic features.
· Tableau Reader : A free application that enables you to open and interact with data visualizations built in Tableau.
· Tableau Mobile : Exploring dashboard from mobile phone.
· Tableau Cloud : it is like Tableau Server but it is Cloud based ( without any internal infrastructure)
And
· Tableau Prep Builder : this is tool is used mainly to clean and restructure data. It has very important functions to calculate, aggregate, and unite data.
Tableau Prep has a nice flow of steps that make working with data even more fun. These steps explain themselves as soon as you start going through them.
The Main Tableau Prep Steps are:
1. Clean: This step gives you a neat look of the data and basic first analysis view that could tell us a lot about what the hypothesis might be. In this step we can calculate, group, split and rename columns and rows.
2. The Aggregation Step: this is step is used to change the level of data to make it less granular. It is more like grouping the data by specific columns that would not be changed.
3. Pivot Step : in this step we can change columns into rows and vice versa. And similar to the aggregation step, the pivoted data will be based on the fields that would not be changed.
4. Union Step: in this step you can connect tables in a vertical way. Simply said, it combines columns that have the same names.
5. The Join Step: in this step we can join (inner, left, right, and full outer join) multiple tables that share at least one common field which contains the same values.
These are not the only things I learned about Tableau Prep, but they are the main things. The most feature that I liked from Tableau Prep is a field in every step that shows you the changes that you made and where exactly you made them. It also enables you to delete and even edit the change.
