Getting Started with Tableau Prep Builder

The whole reason why Jonathan and I created Preppin’ Data was to give people more experience with Tableau Prep Builder and Data Preparation more generally. But what if you have no experience at all? How do you start? Read on to find a simple roadmap to get started with Tableau Prep Builder.

So what is Tableau Prep Builder?
Available for Windows and Mac Operating Systems, Tableau Prep Builder is designed to allow you clean, join and transform data so it is easier to analyse (probably in Tableau). Like any data preparation, you will transform the data in a step-by-step approach. Often data preparation feels like a logic puzzle and we have designed Preppin’ Data to recreate that approach. 

Have you got step-by-step instructions to follow? 
Sure: 
1. Read Tableau’s description of Prep Builder


Go to: https://www.tableau.com/products/prep to get an overview of what Tableau Prep Builder is designed to enable you to do.

2. Download the latest version of Prep Builder
This is available on the same site. Just click on any of the ‘Free Trial’ links or go to here to get the latest version: https://www.tableau.com/products/prep/download

If you are not sure which is the latest version, then go to https://www.tableau.com/support/releases/prep to get the latest version for you.

3. Training Videos

The 67 minutes of training videos are absolutely invaluable: https://www.tableau.com/learn/training#prep
They will help you to get started, walk you through the interface and then use the different features of Prep. You can watch these in bitesize chunks so don’t worry if you haven’t got just over an hour to get started.

4. Latest updates
The Tableau Prep development team are somehow releasing new magic each month. Functionality is being added in to the tool as quickly as we can learn to use it (which is pretty quick thankfully). Stay tuned by keeping an eye on Tableau’s blog to see when new functionality is added.

If you have other questions then feel free to comment here and I will add to this guide as required. Happy Preppin’!

Popular posts from this blog

2023: Week 1 The Data Source Bank

Image
 Created by: Carl Allchin Welcome to a New Year of Preppin' Data. These are weekly exercises to help you learn and develop data preparation skills. We publish the challenges on a Wednesday and share a solution the following Tuesday. You can take the challenges whenever you want and we love to see your solutions. With data preparation, there is never just one way to complete the tasks so sharing your solutions will help others learn too. Share on Twitter, LinkedIn, the Tableau Forums or wherever you want to too. Tag Jenny Martin, Tom Prowse or myself or just use the #PreppinData to share your solutions.  The challenges are designed for learning Tableau Prep but we have a broad community who complete the challenges in R, Python, SQL, DBT, EasyMorph and many other tools. We love seeing people learn new tools so feel free to use whatever tools you want to complete the challenges.  A New Year means we start afresh so January's challenges will be focused on beginners. We will use dif
Read more

2023: Week 2 - International Bank Account Numbers

Image
Challenge By: Jenny Martin For week 2 of our beginner month, Data Source Bank has a requirement to construct International Bank Account Numbers (IBANs), even for Transactions taking place in the UK. We have all the information in separate fields, we just need to put it altogether in the following order: Inputs A list of the transactions, with information about the receiving bank account  A lookup table for the SWIFT Bank Codes  Requirements Input the data In the Transactions table, there is a Sort Code field which contains dashes. We need to remove these so just have a 6 digit string ( hint ) Use the SWIFT Bank Code lookup table to bring in additional information about the SWIFT code and Check Digits of the receiving bank account ( hint ) Add a field for the Country Code ( hint ) Hint: all these transactions take place in the UK so the Country Code should be GB Create the IBAN as above ( hint ) Hint: watch out for trying to combine sting fields with numeric fields - check data types Re
Read more

How to...Handle Free Text

Image
Free isn't always a good thing. In data, Free text is the example to state when proving that statements correct. However, lots of benefit can be gained from understanding data that has been entered in Free Text fields. What do we mean by Free Text? Free Text is the string based data that comes from allowing people to type answers in to systems and forms. The resulting data is normally stored within one column, with one answer per cell. As Free Text means the answer could be anything, this is what you get - absolutely anything. From expletives to slang, the words you will find in the data may be a challenge to interpret but the text is the closest way to collect the voice of your customer / employee. The Free Text field is likely to contain long, rambling sentences that can simply be analysed. If you count these fields, you are likely to have one of each entry each. Therefore, simply counting the entries will not provide anything meaningful to your analysis. The value is in
Read more