A fundamental component of Tableau Prep is the ability to clean messy data. One of the best ways to do that is by creating groups! However, creating groups can be confusing. How does Tableau Prep decide what to name a group? For example, if you group "Boise" and "Boise City" together into a single city name, which does Tableau Prep choose? Well, that all depends on the grouping method you select.

Automated Groups: If you use automated groups (grouping on pronunciation, common characters, etc.) it will choose the more populous value. So if there are 100 rows for "Boise" and 5 rows for "Boise City", the group name will default to "Boise".

Tableau Prep is a powerful data preparation tool which allows you to do complex data transformation in a "no code" environment. No need to learn Python, SQL or R to shape your data.

While Tableau Prep has come a long ways in its first five years of existence, it's still a young tool with limitations. For example, it's not strong at crafting multi-row formulas (e.g. referencing the value from the previous row in the next row).

Tableau Prep is a powerful tool for cleaning, structuring and preparing data for analysis in Tableau Desktop. The Tableau Prep Builder software provides the ability to create data workflows which can be run manually. That's fine when data is updated infrequently, but it doesn't work well when data needs to be refreshed every day or every hour.

Tableau Prep is a powerful tool for cleaning and shaping data. One of its weaknesses is that it can be slow on a desktop computer. There are a number of reasons for that (computer memory limitations, size of data source, complexity of steps, etc.). One of the ways that Tableau Prep conducts these performance issues is to sample your data automatically.

Tableau Prep is a new desktop application (released spring, 2018) provided by Tableau to assist with complex data preparation.