Introduction

This chapter will start by covering the data types available in Tableau and how they interact. You will look into ways to clean data once it has been brought into both Tableau Desktop and Tableau Prep, followed by the data transformation options available in both. Finally, the methods available to combine data sources in both Tableau Desktop and Tableau Prep will be covered.

When importing data into Tableau for analysis, there are a number of considerations to make first. For example, a company wanting to analyze quarterly sales data in Tableau would first need to consider whether the data is complete and include sales for the whole quarter. The product names in the quarterly sales data may need to be cleaned first and some transformations may be required, such as calculating total sales from the unit price and the quantity sold. To make these decisions, the user needs to understand the different data types in Tableau so that they can be configured correctly, as well...