By: Oliver Linley
Ollie lives in Cape Town, South Africa, and is passionate about all things data - and all things Tableau! If you have a question, feel free to reach out to him directly via email.
Getting the structure of our data correct for Tableau Desktop can make a huge difference. Tableau is pretty picky about the way it wants our data to be formatted. Generally, each column should be a new dimension or measure.
But, sometimes, we run into tables of data that have a single dimension (or measure) split over multiple columns. In that case, Tableau won't be able to work with the data optimally. For instance, if we had a new column for every year in our dataset, we'd be limited to viewing each year as a single field in our worksheets. That would significantly reduce the kinds of analyses we could perform in Tableau.
So, by using Tableau's pivot function, we can move columns to rows in our data source, allowing us to ensure that each column is a new measure or a new dimension.
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