“Tableau Prep” (formerly known as Tableau Prep Builder), often nicknamed “Tableau Genie.” Tableau Prep is a data preparation tool by Tableau that allows you to clean, shape, and combine your data from various sources before visualizing it in Tableau Desktop.

Tableau Prep helps you perform tasks like data cleaning, data transformation, splitting columns, aggregating data, handling missing values, and more. This process of preparing the data is important to ensure that the data you visualize is accurate and meaningful.

Here’s a quick overview of using Tableau Prep:

1. Connecting Data Sources: Connect to your data sources, which could be databases, Excel files, CSVs, or other data formats.
2. Data Transformation: Use Tableau Prep’s intuitive interface to clean and reshape your data. You can filter, pivot, join, union, and perform other transformations.
3. Cleaning Data: Fix data quality issues like missing values, duplicates, and inconsistencies.
4. Combining Data: Merge data from multiple sources into a unified dataset for analysis.
5. Output: After preparing the data, you can output the cleaned dataset for use in Tableau Desktop or other tools.