Monthly Archives: June 2018

Tableau Enterprise

FEATURE ADOPTION – TABLEAU PREP

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Tableau Prep is a new product from Tableau designed to help Desktop users quickly and confidently combine, shape, and clean your data for analysis. The direct & visual experience gives you a deeper understanding of your data and makes data prep easier and more accessible.

  1. Tableau Prep cool features:
  • Desktop integration: Tableau Desktop can be launched to preview the results almost at any Prep steps
  • Data profiling pan: visualize data value and distributions
  • See your data at each of the data cleaning, shaping, filtering process
  • Repeatable process: Click ‘Run’ to get new output when source data changed
  • Push output to server

2. Tableau Prep limitations:

  • If you are doing data preparation mainly using Excel or join/union between CSV and other datasets, Tableau Prep is for you!
  • Prep does not replace any existing enterprise ETL tool
  • Prep has about 20 data source connectors while Desktop has 50+ connectors. Tableau is working on new Prep connectors
  • Prep output can’t be scheduled for auto refresh on Tableau server. Tableau is working on Tableau Prep server feature
  • A powerful PC or Mac would be needed for Prep to process complicated logic with large volume of data

3. Tableau Prep output:

  • Final Prep output can be .csv, or .tde or .hyper.  Both .tde and .hyper are Tableau data engine formats that can only be opened by Tableau Desktop. .Hyper is a new format that can only be opened by Tableau Desktop 10.5.* and above.
  • You can open your previousely saved .tfl Prep workflow for further editing
  • You can also open your previousely saved .tfl Prep workflow just to refresh output with data source changes
  • Prep output can be pushed to Tableau server as a published data source. However Tableau server can’t refresh Tableau Prep workflow.  Tableau Prep community outside is coming up some workaround for this.

4. Publish Prep output to Tableau server – detailed steps:

  • Publisher permission is required for this feature and again this is not for auto refresh
  • Add output from Prep flow
  • Select ‘Publish as a data source’
  • Select a server, sign-in, then type in full URL of your Tableau server….
  • Enter machine admin user name and password when asked.
  • After sign-in, select Project where you want the data source to be published
  • Give name of the data source to be published on serv
  • Description of the data source (option)
  • Click ‘Run Flow’