(Please see this post for an update on how to do this in 2021)
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Tableau Prep is a great tool for dealing with messy or unorganized data. After understanding the basics, one of the first things I found myself wondering was “does Tableau Prep have the ability to unpivot data?”. It has a pivot feature but does not have an unpivot or transpose feature at this point. However, there is a workaround.
Imagine you have a dataset that looks like this:
The first step (after connecting to the data) will be to add a clean step and create a calculated field for each measure:
When this is done, there are going to be some large null sections for each measure. That is okay. We’ll deal with that momentarily:
You can now remove the Measure and Values fields.
From there we can add the created measures to “Aggregated Fields” and the other dimensions to “Grouped Fields”:
From there the data can be exported and is unpivoted:
Want to learn more about Tableau Prep? Join our webinar Using Tableau Prep on Dirty Data May 16th at 9:00 am PDT.
Want to master the product? Sign up for our workshop Tableau Prep Foundations May 22nd-24th while there's still space!