Tableau Prep – Redefine Data Cleaning with Tableau

Overview

• Tableau Prep redefines the way you do data preparation
• The tool reduces the struggle of common tasks, like joins, pivots, unions, etc.
• Major time consuming operations can now be done with one-click and drag-and-drop functions

Introduction

If you’ve been in data science long enough, you will have heard the popular line – “people spend 80% of their time prepping data and only 20% of their time analyzing it”. And as more and more data sources become available, dealing with dirty data becomes more time consuming and challenging. It is one of the most tedious and repetitive processes in a data scientist’s job.

But what does Tableau have to do with it? It has long been touted as one of the best (if not the best) data visualization tool out there but the ability to clean data has always been a gaping hole in it’s repertoire. With Tableau Prep, the company has integrated this long missing feature into it’s offerings. Tableau is popular for it’s neat interface and deep features – and with this latest product, that visual element gives you a deeper understanding and ability to deal with the data you collect.

Tableau Prep reduces the struggle of common tasks, like joins, pivots, unions, etc. And of course, you don’t need to perform any coding to do this. Isn’t that one of the major attractions of Tableau? This product is built on three coordinated views:

• a data grid to see your row-level data
• a profile pane to look at profiles of each column
• a flow pane to understand your entire data preparation process

The algorithms behind Tableau Prep turn repetitive tasks into one-click or drag-and-drop operations. It is fully integrated with the Desktop version of Tableau so you can move smoothly from data preparation to data exploration.

Try it out by downloading Tableau Prep from here.

Our take on this

As a long-term Tableau user, I am loving this product! The release has been really well received in the data visualization community. It’s the ideal support tool for Tableau Desktop and it’s easy integration with the main software has been well developed. The amount of time this will save the user is one of the biggest unique selling points of this tool.

Use the comments section below to tell us your experience using it!

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Pranav Dar

Senior Editor at Analytics Vidhya.Data visualization practitioner who loves reading and delving deeper into the data science and machine learning arts. Always looking for new ways to improve processes using ML and AI.