Category Archives: Data Shape & Structure
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State of the Unions in Tableau Prep: MINUS, EXCEPT and INTERSECT
Posted on January 2, 2019 by Joshua Milligan in All, Calculations, Data Blending & Joining, Data Shape & Structure, Tableau Prep (Maestro).Recently I gave a “State of the Unions” address for Tableau’s Think Data Thursday (the recording is here) in which I discussed new features for unions in Tableau Prep and Tableau Desktop. One thing I didn’t cover, but has subsequently come up is the question “What about INTERSECT and MINUS or EXCEPT Unions”? Can we […]
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Exploring DataRobot predictions using Tableau and Tableau Prep
Posted on October 16, 2018 by Joshua Milligan in All, Dashboards, Data Blending & Joining, Data Shape & Structure, DataRobot, Tableau Prep (Maestro).I’ve been hearing about DataRobot for a while now (in fact, Teknion Data Solutions, where I’ve been a consultant for nearly 15 years, recently became a DataRobot partner) but I hadn’t had the chance to be involved in actually using DataRobot… …until now!And in conjunction with my colleague and fellow Tableau Zen Master, Bridget Cogley, […]
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Rank and Ranking in Tableau Prep
Posted on June 15, 2018 by Joshua Milligan in All, Calculations, Data Blending & Joining, Data Shape & Structure, Tableau Prep (Maestro), Tips and Tricks.One thing I’ve submitted an idea for Tableau Prep (and would love if you voted for it!) is the ability to use Table Calculations, especially Index() and PreviousValue(). This would solve a lot of use cases, including adding row numbers, rank, sort, handling cumulative values, and more. But to compute a rank or sort specifically, […]
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How to handle new input files in Tableau Prep
Posted on June 7, 2018 by Joshua Milligan in All, Data Shape & Structure, Tableau Prep (Maestro), Tips and Tricks.How to handle new input files in Tableau Prep Let’s say you’ve got a situation where you get new input files for Tableau Prep every month (or, maybe in your case it’s every week or every day or every so often). These aren’t files to be added to your data source in addition to existing […]
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How to remove duplicate records in Tableau Prep
Posted on May 23, 2018 by Joshua Milligan in All, Calculations, Data Shape & Structure, Level of Detail Calcs, Tableau Prep (Maestro), Tips and Tricks, Uncategorized.One of the questions that comes up quite often is “How do I remove duplicate records in Tableau Prep?” or “How do I dedup data in Tableau Prep?” Some data preparation tools have a specific feature to do this. At first glance, the first version of Tableau Prep doesn’t seem to have this feature. BUT […]
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Unpivot in Tableau Prep (Rows to Columns)
Posted on April 23, 2018 by Joshua Milligan in All, Calculations, Data Blending & Joining, Data Shape & Structure, Tableau Prep (Maestro).You know you have a great piece of software when you can use its paradigm to come up with workarounds to features that don’t yet exist. Such is the case with Tableau Prep (formerly Project Maestro). I recently needed to unpivot some data and realized, the Tableau devs are truly miracle workers! Unpivot Data – […]
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Cross Database Union & the other MAX/MIN functions in Tableau
Posted on March 12, 2018 by Joshua Milligan in All, Calculations, Data Blending & Joining, Data Shape & Structure, Tips and Tricks.Cross database joins have been available in Tableau for a while now – and I love the ability to join data at a row-level across various databases and files! And union functionality is available, but for now, only if you are dealing with tables in the same database (or files or Excel tabs). But what […]
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A Sample Flow in Tableau Prep (Project Maestro)
Posted on February 13, 2018 by Joshua Milligan in All, Data Blending & Joining, Data Shape & Structure, Level of Detail Calcs, Tableau Prep (Maestro).I recently had the privilege of presenting a preview of Tableau’s Project Maestro (now known as Tableau Prep) to the Amazon Tableau User Group. This is not the exact presentation, but is a very similar data flow to the one I demonstrated there. The flow also shows how to replicate a Level of Detail calculation […]
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Latest Snapshot in Tableau and Tableau Prep (Maestro)
Posted on February 1, 2018 by Joshua Milligan in All, Calculations, Data Blending & Joining, Data Shape & Structure, Level of Detail Calcs, Tableau Prep (Maestro).Often, you’ll have data that looks something like this: Every day, there are new records for projects that give the latest status and count of hours used. Often a project spans multiple days and the status can change and count of hours might go up. But if I want to get the most recent […]
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Hex Map Spatial File
Posted on December 21, 2017 by Joshua Milligan in All, Data Shape & Structure, DataViz, Mapping / Geographic Visualization.I love hex maps! Especially for the United States, you can keep states in a basic geographic orientation, but eliminate the visual perception problems caused by the fact that some states are huge compared to others (and Alaska and Hawaii shift the scale when added). But there are a few headaches that can occur when […]
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Joshua Milligan is a four-time Tableau Zen Master. His passion is training, mentoring, and helping people gain insights and make decisions based on their data through data visualization using Tableau.
He is a principal consultant at Teknion Data Solutions, where he has served clients in numerous industries since 2004.
Joshua served as technical reviewer on several Tableau titles and is the author of the book Learning Tableau.
