Summary
We started this chapter with an introduction to Prep. We looked at the GUI and how we can connect data to it. After that, we did some exercises regarding data preparation. This can be divided into five parts: data cleaning, unions and joins, aggregating, pivoting, and scripting. We also considered several additional options to improve the usefulness of your data, including inserting steps from other flows, and incremental refreshes. To round out this chapter on Prep, we looked at exporting data. Here, we saw that the new dataset can be saved as a file or data extract, written back to an external database, or pushed directly to Tableau Server.
Just like Tableau Desktop, Prep is very much self-explanatory and highly visual. Colors, symbols, and highlights make it easy to get used to this extract, transform, and load tool, which is invaluable for preparing your data before manipulating it on the main Tableau interface!
In the next chapter, we’ll continue our exploration...
