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!
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".
Selection Groups: If you create selection groups in the clean step (using CTRL and SHIFT) the group name will be whichever value you selected last before selecting "Group".
Manual Grouping: If you use the "Manual Grouping" feature in the grouping dialogue, it will be whichever value you selected first.
Are you thoroughly confused yet?!?
Check out this video to see a run through of a couple grouping approaches and which group name Tableau Prep takes.
Need help with Tableau? Sign up for an office hour to work with Eric! You can also check out our upcoming classes for a Tableau deep dive!
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