Preparing data for visualizations

Most visualization tools require that we provide a denormalized tabular data source to work properly and others require you to build a model. In Chapter 4, Recipe 1, Pivoting and unpivoting your data, we used the Transpose and Cross Tab tools to facilitate a series of operations that allowed us to prepare a tabular format to use in a visualization.

In this recipe, we’ll be preparing a dataset to perfectly work with visualization tools.

Our file comes from a previous preparation process, and what we have so far is the following:

Figure 8.5: Data input preview

This output format (mostly putting data partitions in columns) is a commonly used process to generate outputs, let’s say for Excel.

But we are going to elevate this report a little bit, using a visualization tool, so we need to get it into a format that works well with these tools.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we prepared a test set that...