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!
When you union tables in Tableau, you append two tables of data vertically. That means if you have two tables that are 1,000 rows each, the result of the union will be a single table that is 2,000 rows. Shared columns will align automatically, and unique columns will not.
Unions provide the ability to relate multiple tables that contain different data types or structures without worrying about granularity. Many times, fact tables that primarily consist of measures cannot be joined together because the join would lead to undesired row duplication.
Unions are great for building complex data models. If you want to learn how to set them up and some of the nuances to consider when making them in Tableau Prep, check out this video!
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