Two lots of Tableau Prep practice this week. A forum question (see end of post) and #PreppinData 2024 week 3. The challenge for #PreppinData was to join targets from a spreadsheet, with a sheet per quarter, to our previous sales figures. And then to calculate difference from target. Similar union and clean up steps to previous challenges to get to the point where there are two data sets to join, and where we have consistent fields in both (first letter of class, and a month number). Then the join is pretty straightforward:

The forum question involved duplicating a set of rows – once for each value in a comma separated list in one of the columns. And then filtering out any cases where a value in another column appeared in the list. What I found interesting about Tableau Prep in this case was that I can specify a wildcard search for the pivot (B below), but for the initial split whilst I can select “all” it does still hardcode the number of columns split out (A below). So one of the tasks would robustly handle the introduction of more values in the comma separated list, but the other task would not … I think. The workarounds I came across seemed to be to work out how many values you could have in the string and specify enough splits to handle that number. I wonder if that could be improved…