Data Prep and the New Tableau 9 Data Interpreter
The Tableau 9 Data Interpreter and other new data prep options, such as pivot and split, open up new possibilities for connecting to data. No longer will you have to spend all your time fixing data structure and cleaning up headers, footers, and merged cells in Excel. Tableau 9.0 makes that (and more) so much easier so you can get to asking and answering questions and visualizing the data!
Want to learn more about Tableau 9.0 features? Check out my favorite feature and some of my other favorites.
The video below is first in a series I will be doing for Teknion Data Solutions. In this video I’ll demonstrate the new data preparation features of Tableau 9, including the new data interpreter.
<shameless plug> I have been working as a consultant with Teknion Data Solutionsfor over 10 years and love it! If you enjoy Tableau (or any aspect of BI) and love to help others, consider joining Teknion’s team of consultants. </shameless plug>
I had a great time presenting this feature and others at DFW TUG! What a turn out! Thanks to everyone who came and for those who made it come together. If you were there (or even not) and have any additional questions leave a comment on this post and I’ll gladly try to answer. I also presented on other new Tableau 9.0 features, including:
- New Data Connection Options (Pivot, Split, Data Interpreter)
- Level of Detail (LOD) calculations
- Regular Expressions
- New Calculation Editor & Ad Hoc Calculations
- Drag and Drop Analytics
- Fun and Useful Enhancements (color picker, thumbnail preview, map search, new selection options)
- Tableau Server Updates
And, now, the video:
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Joshua Milligan is a five-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.
Hi Joshua,
Thank you for sharing the video. Do you know how to convert the date columns when we have a “wide data”?I have a similar sheet as the one in video with month and year in the columns. When I “unpivot” the data, the pivot table fields become string and converting it to date makes them “null” values. It gets very hard to analyze the data.
*I actually just found a get around by creating a new caluculated field: DATEPARSE(“MMM-yy”, str([Date]))
That will work! Thanks for the comments.
Hi,
Is the pivot option only available when we connect to excel data source? I’m trying to pivot on a mySQL data source but not able to find the pivot option.
Manoj,
That is correct. You’ll have to use Custom SQL or some kind of transformation tool to reshape relational databases. Maybe a future feature? One can hope…
you would need to use the UNION all in SQL … there is an example from tableau with the link below :
http://onlinehelp.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/help.htm#pivot.html