From the course: Tableau Certified Data Analyst Cert Prep

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Preparing the data

Preparing the data - Tableau Tutorial

From the course: Tableau Certified Data Analyst Cert Prep

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Preparing the data

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- [Instructor] When you work with data from spreadsheets, ideally your file looks like this. Everything starts in cell A1, with one single row of headers in the first row, one field per column, and then one dataset per row. However, often your spreadsheets may look like this. We have some logos and some additional information at the top, multiple levels of headers, possibly even some combined cells, as we see here with the address combined into one field with street, city, zip code, and state. And worst of all, a cross table where we don't have one field for the date, but have our sales spread out across multiple columns with one column per quarter. Let's see how Tableau deals with that. I create a new data source and connect to my Microsoft Excel file. This one is called Kinetico_pivot. If we open this up, we can see that Tableau deals very poorly with this kind of file. Tableau cannot identify the header information, so it simply numbers the columns, F1 through F11. Tableau doesn't…

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