What is Tableau Prep?

Prepping your data for analysis can often feel like the most time-consuming part of the job. You spend hours cleaning up messy spreadsheets, combining different files, and wrangling columns just to get your data into a usable format. Tableau Prep is a tool built specifically to tackle this challenge, streamlining the entire data preparation process so you can get to insights faster. This article will show you what Tableau Prep is, how it works, and how it helps you turn messy data into a clean, analysis-ready resource.

What Exactly is Tableau Prep?

Tableau Prep is a data preparation tool designed to make cleaning, shaping, and combining your data a more visual and intuitive process. Most data analysts report spending up to 80% of their time just preparing data rather than analyzing it. Tableau Prep aims to reverse that, freeing you from tedious manual tasks so you can focus on finding answers in your data.

It's built on a simple premise: your data preparation process should be repeatable, scalable, and easy to understand. Instead of writing complex scripts or getting lost in endless spreadsheet formulas, you build a visual workflow, or "flow," that documents every step of your data transformation. This flow can be saved and re-run anytime you have new data, saving you from repeating the same cleaning steps over and over again.

Tableau Prep is comprised of two core components that work together: Tableau Prep Builder, where you create your data flows, and Tableau Prep Conductor, which automates them.

The Two Components of Tableau Prep

To really understand Tableau Prep, you need to know about its two main parts and how they serve different needs in the data preparation workflow.

1. Tableau Prep Builder

Tableau Prep Builder is the desktop application where you actually build your data preparation flows. It presents a visual, drag-and-drop environment perfect for seeing your data change in real time as you apply different transformations.

Here's what you can do inside Tableau Prep Builder:

• Connect to your data: Prep Builder connects to a wide variety of data sources, from simple flat files like CSVs and Excel spreadsheets to large enterprise databases like SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and cloud sources.
• Clean and shape your data: This is where the magic happens. A few of the most common cleaning operations include:
• Join and Union data: If your data is scattered across multiple tables or files, Prep Builder makes it simple to combine them.
• See profiles of your data: As you perform each step, Prep Builder gives you a visual profile of your data. You can instantly see the distribution of values in each column, identify outliers, and spot null values without having to write any code. This immediate feedback helps you catch issues right away.
• Output your data: Once your flow is complete, you can output the clean dataset as a Tableau .hyper file (optimized for performance), a CSV file, or publish it directly to Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud for immediate use in dashboards.

2. Tableau Prep Conductor

Tableau Prep Conductor is the operational powerhouse of Tableau Prep. It allows you to automate, schedule, and monitor the flows you built in Prep Builder. While Prep Builder is the design studio, Prep Conductor is the factory, ensuring your data preparation happens consistently and reliably without any manual effort.

Prep Conductor is part of the Data Management add-on for Tableau Server and Tableau Cloud. Its key responsibilities include:

• Scheduling Flows: Your weekly sales report requires fresh data every Monday morning. Instead of manually opening Prep Builder and running your flow, you can schedule it with Prep Conductor to run automatically at 6:00 AM every Monday. This means your clean, updated data source is always waiting for you.
• Monitoring and Alerts: It provides a centralized view of all the data preparation flows running in your organization. You can quickly see which flows ran successfully and which ones failed. If a flow fails, it can send an alert so you can investigate and resolve the issue quickly.
• Centralized Management: By publishing flows to Tableau Server or Cloud, your team has a single location to manage and reuse important data preparation logic. This promotes consistency and ensures everyone is working from the same trusted data.

In short, Tableau Prep Builder is for creating a data prep process, and Tableau Prep Conductor is for automating and managing that process at scale.

Why Use Tableau Prep? The Core Benefits

Moving from manual methods like Excel to a dedicated tool like Tableau Prep has several significant advantages that directly impact your productivity and the quality of your analytics.

Get a Visual Overview of Your Data Prep Process

One of the biggest struggles with data preparation is that the process is often a "black box." A complex SQL script or a series of intricate Excel macros can be nearly impossible for another person - or even your future self - to understand. Tableau Prep's visual flows are self-documenting. Anyone on your team can open a flow and immediately trace the steps, from the raw data source to the final clean output. This makes collaboration easier and troubleshooting much faster.

Save Immense Amounts of Time

This is the most celebrated benefit. Repetitive manual tasks are a major time sink. If you spend a few hours every week cleaning and combining the same datasets, Tableau Prep can give you that time back. You build the data processing logic once in a visual flow. After that, refreshing your data is as simple as clicking a button or letting a schedule do it for you. This allows you to shift your focus from tedious preparation to valuable analysis.

Improve Data Accuracy and Consistency

Manual data manipulation in spreadsheets is notoriously error-prone. One wrong click, a mistyped formula, or an accidental deletion can corrupt your data. By automating the cleaning process with a set flow, you eliminate the risk of human error. Furthermore, using Prep Conductor to centralize your flows ensures that everyone in the organization applies the same business rules and logic. For example, you can create a single, official flow that defines what constitutes an "active customer," ensuring everyone's analysis starts from the same source of truth.

Empower More People to Prepare Data

You don't need to be a coding guru to use Tableau Prep. It's designed to be approachable for users who aren't data engineers or SQL experts. Business analysts, marketers, sales operations managers, and others who understand their data but are often intimidated by technical tools can use the intuitive interface to prepare their own data for analysis. This self-service capability reduces bottlenecks and reliance on specialized IT or data teams, fostering a more data-driven culture across the company.

Example Walkthrough: Cleaning Sales Data

Let's walk through a simple, practical scenario to see how Tableau Prep works in action.

The Situation: You have an Excel file of Online Orders for the past quarter. You also have a CSV file containing Customer Details, including their name and location. You want to join these two sources, clean up some messy data, and get a single table ready for analysis in Tableau.

Here's how you'd build a flow in Tableau Prep Builder:

1. Connect to Sources: First, you’d open Tableau Prep Builder and connect to both the Online Orders Excel file and the Customer Details CSV. The two data sources appear on your flow canvas.
2. Clean the Customer Data: Click on the Customer Details step. You'll notice the customer's State and Zip Code combined in a single field like “CA 90210.” By selecting that column, you can use the built-in "Automatic Split" feature. Prep instantly recognizes the pattern and creates two new columns: ‘State’ and ‘Zip Code’. You also see a field with trailing spaces, which you can fix with a "Trim Spaces" cleaning operation done with one click.
3. Standardize the Order Data: Now you click on the Online Orders step. You see a ‘Product Category’ column with spelling inconsistencies like “Appliances,” “Appliance,” and “appl.” Using the "Group Values" feature and its pronunciation algorithm, Prep suggests grouping all these variations under a single name, “Appliances.” You accept the suggestion, and your categories are now standardized perfectly.
4. Join the Data: With both data sources cleaned, you drag the customer step onto the order step and drop it on the "Join" option. Prep prompts you to select the common keys: 'Customer_ID' on the customer side and 'Customer_ID' on the order data side. You'll have your combined table in seconds. A visual Venn diagram shows you exactly how the data joined and if there are any values that didn't match.
5. Create an Aggregate View: For our final step, we’ll drag an ‘Aggregate’ icon into our flow. Here we’ll decide what to 'group by', like State and Product Category, and how to aggregate the sales: 'Sum’ of 'Sale Price.' This effectively gives you a pivot table-style summary of your data in just a couple of clicks.
6. Run Output Step: Lastly, you create an 'Output' step, where you can choose to output the final data to a Tableau .hyper file or a CSV. You click ‘Run now’ and within seconds you have a perfect, clean, analysis-ready dataset waiting for you in Tableau Desktop.

Final Thoughts

Tableau Prep tackles one of the most universal challenges in data analytics - the tedious and time-consuming process of getting data ready. Transforming that process into a visual, repeatable flow empowers analysts and business users alike to spend more time finding insights and less time fighting dirty data.

As we've seen, creation tools are just part of the equation. Adding Graphed, we believe the process should be easier and seamless, like making a simple visual drag-and-drop, without the steep learning curve of traditional BI tools. Make connecting your data a breeze and let Graphed help you achieve your goals effortlessly.