Empower yourself with the ability to gather, merge, clean, shape, and prepare your data for analysis in Tableau using Tableau Prep. The Data Visualization tool, Tableau now has a personal data preparation and ETL tool among its suite of products to prepare data for easy analysis. It is as intuitive as the Tableau Desktop & Server and works flawlessly in tandem with both. It is called Tableau Prep. Tableau Prep is compatible with older versions of Tableau products, all the way down to Tableau 10.0 and can output. the and. hyper files along with .csv files for use with other applications. Most companies unfortunately spend 80 percent of their time on Data Preparation and only 20 percent on analysis despite the latter being a higher value task. And this has always been a constant concern for large enterprises and analytics vendors. They have been silently screaming for automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to automate data. Tableau Prep is designed as a self-service tool to reshape data without scripting or coding to address the common data management problem. The ETL tool primarily automates, joins, unions, pivots and aggregates via a drag and drop visual interface to streamline all the common tasks. Below is a bird’s eye view of Tableau Prep’s appealing UI.
- It gives you a complete picture of your data – In Tableau Prep, the screen gets shared into three sets. The topmost panel is for data flow or a graphical representation of the workflow. The center panel is for data summary where the profile section in the center has histograms to portray the occurrence of values within columns. This makes it very easy to see how data is distributed. The last panel displays the row-level data. You can choose which view to interact with, based on the task at hand.
- It gives you instant results – You can edit a value by selecting and editing it directly. You can change your join type and view the results instantly since each action immediately lets you see the change in your data despite millions of rows. Tableau Prep gives you the liberty to re-order steps and experiment without consequence.
- Makes you work smarter and faster – Tableau Prep provides the fuzzy matching of similar fields. It uses a phonetic algorithm to index words using their pronunciation. This is extremely helpful in combining several common names in a column that are listed separately due to a spelling issue or non-standardized naming. You can use the EFL tool’s smart features to fix these common Data Prep challenges and consider it as a fast tool because it likes to use its hyperdata engine whenever possible.
- You can connect to more data – The Data Preparation tool intelligently pushes operations down to the database when possible. This lets you benefit from the existing database investments for fast flow execution performance. Also, the visual representation of your data in the Profile pane lets you view data at the record level. Clicking on a data point highlights other associated fields in the other columns giving you an idea about the data connection made. Tableau Prep can connect to 18 different file/database types and can write to TDE, Hyper, or CSV.
- Let’s you enjoy the flow – It’s easy to open your output with Tableau Desktop or share it with others via Tableau Server or Tableau Online. This reduces friction and helps you bridge the gap between Data Preparation and analytics, for better business results. It can also save your flows to share them with other people or for future use in case your data is updated.
- Enables you to share your data securely – You can share your data sources securely using Tableau Server or Tableau Online and foster an environment where everyone in your organization works with governed data.
In the end, you can add a final output step where you can specify and save your data to a concrete file and location in your hard drive. Or you can publish it as a data source. So, how do you get started? Contact us to have a chat.