By: Eric Parker
Eric lives in Seattle and has been teaching Tableau and Alteryx for 5 years. He's helped thousands of students solve their most pressing problems. If you have a question, feel free to reach out to him directly via email.
Tableau Prep is a new desktop application (released spring, 2018) provided by Tableau to assist with complex data preparation. When you have multiple tables of data that require a variety of steps (joins, unions, pivots, aggregations) to get into the final format you desire for analysis, Tableau Prep can help simplify the process. It’s also great for automating manual data preparation processes done in Excel, Access or some similar tool.
If you build a workflow in Tableau Prep and want to revisit, edit or share it, you can save the workflow as one of two possible file types. Here’s a brief overview of the file types and their primary use cases.
Packaged Tableau Flow File (.tflx)
A .tflx file contains the following attributes:
· Data source connection information for server-based data.
· Copy of (file-based) data packaged into flow
· Metadata Information (tools and changes applied to data after it comes into Tableau Prep)
Use:
A Packaged Tableau Flow File is the most robust option for sharing your work. If you create a flow and want to share it with a colleague for testing or tweaking, this is a surefire way of making sure they have access to all the data (as long as they have the necessary credentials to access any server-based data). Because this file contains a copy of the file-based data, it can grow large quickly.
Tableau Flow File (.tfl)
A .tfl file contains the following attributes:
· Data source connection information (for all data).
· Metadata Information (tools and changes applied to data after it comes into Tableau).
Use:
This is a great file type for two different scenarios…
If you are building a workflow against a large file-based data source, intend to share it with a colleague, and they also have access to that file. It keeps large amounts of data from being packaged into the file.
It’s also useful if you are creating a workflow on a file-based data source that is going to be changing often. Instead of having to constantly reconnect to the original file instead of the packaged file, the connection to the original file will always be maintained.