Tableau Prep Join Types Explained (All 7!)

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!

One of the primary ways we combine multiple tables of data in Tableau Prep is with joins! Joins allow us to merge multiple tables of data horizontally on a common key.

One of the things that distinguishes joins in Tableau Prep from Tableau Desktop are all the join types we can create! In Tableau Desktop, we're limited to Left, Right, Inner and Outer joins. In Tableau Prep we have those four options with the addition of Left Unmatched, Right Matched and All Unmatched. Those unmatched join types provide greater flexibility to create customized workflows and identify values which did not match in our join clause.

Ready to learn how to harness the full power of joins in Tableau Prep? Check out this video!

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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