Normalize (reformat) cross-tab data for Tableau without using Excel

Question

Tableau generally works best when input data is in \"normalized\" format, rather than cross-tab. This is also referred to as converting from \"wide format\" to \"long format

Answer 1

Newer versions of Tableau (9.0 and above) allow reshaping of data on import. It's as simple as selecting the columns you want to stack. Here's a useful tutorial.

In 2018, Tableau released Tableau Prep Builder for reshaping and wrangling Data for analysis.

Some other commercial tools useful for reshaping and cleaning data worth investigating are:

• Trifacta
• Paxata
• Alteryx

Trifacta was created by some of the people who worked on the previous academic DataWrangler project. I've been told that Alteryx is good for some prep tasks for geospatial related data, and have met some enthusiastic Paxata users.

I have too little hands on experience with them to give more than a reference to their web sites, tending to use Python scripts instead to date.

If you want to "fold" columns that you want to merge into a single column. Tableau wrote a helpful tutorial here. Tableau 9 introduced some useful reshaping features for unpivoting tables and splitting columns.