Tableau Prep
Tableau Prep is a data preparation and ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tool created by Tableau. It is intended to assist users with cleaning, shaping, and combining data from diverse sources so that it is ready for analysis and visualization in Tableau Desktop or Tableau Server. As data cleaning is the first and foremost step which is of high importance otherwise datasets may contain NULL values and may result in wrong prediction of data.
Merits of Tableau Prep:
- User-friendly user interface: Tableau Prep offers a user-friendly user interface that makes the data preparation process simpler. Without substantial coding or scripting, users may execute data cleansing and transformations using a visual and straightforward drag-and-drop approach.
- Data deduplication, data imputation, and data filtering are just a few of the data cleaning and shaping procedures that Tableau Prep provides. By separating, combining, or pivoting fields, users can rearrange data to make it easier to prepare for analysis and display.
Demerits of Tableau Prep:
- Tableau Prep mostly concentrates on data cleaning and fundamental transformations, with some limited advanced data manipulation. It might not have all of the sophisticated data manipulation functions that specific ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) solutions have. Users with intricate data transformation needs might find the tool to be restrictive.
- Tableau Prep may not support complex calculations, scripting, or custom functions, requiring users to rely on other tools or languages like SQL, Python, or R for advanced data manipulation.
- Different licenses are required for Tableau Prep, which is a different product from Tableau Desktop. This raises the overall cost, and companies must determine if the extra expense is acceptable in light of their unique data preparation requirements.
Different Tableau Products and its Applications
Tableau is a powerful data visualization tool developed by Salesforce. It has a vast number of extensible files which helps in making the data to be visualized easily either in the form of pdf, word, excel, JSON, SQL, statistical file and many more. It supports more than 50 +file formats.
It has the capability to perform various complex operations, and analytics just in a single step of simply dragging and representing in a span of milliseconds. Other than this it also offers various customization options, filters and complex calculations, maps and different types of graphs like bar graphs, histograms, heat maps, box plots and many more.
Tableau offers different-different types of products based on the tasks to perform.
- Tableau Desktop
- Tableau Online
- Tableau Server
- Tableau Public
- Tableau Prep
Let’s talk about all these Tableau Products in detail.