By: Eric Parker
Eric Parker lives in Seattle and has been teaching Tableau and Alteryx since 2014. 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. You can follow him on LinkedIn or sign up for a Tableau Office Hour to work with him directly!
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.
Wait, what?
Yep! Once your data source is large enough (typically more than a few hundred thousand rows) Tableau Prep will sample the data automatically.
Usually, there is a "Sample" icon visible in the Tableau Prep selections, but not always.
Check out this video to learn how sampling works, where to look to see if your data is being sampled, and how you can override Tableau Prep so it loads all your data, regardless of the data source size.
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