Tableau Software : Preparing spreadsheet data for analysis gets easier—new with Tableau Prep 2018.1.2

Excel spreadsheets often contain complex reports spread across multiple worksheets. Below is an example that has multiple, similar worksheets with two tables on each - a crosstab of monthly sales and tax data and a small summary table. It's often hard to access the data in these sub-tables and combine them without a lot of manual cut/paste work to reshape the data. With the new Tableau Prep you can easily wildcard union the sub-tables discovered by the data interpreter!

The data interpreter will scan the spreadsheets to look for sub-tables and add them in the left Connections pane of Tableau Prep. It finds four sheets (2015, 2016, 2017, 2018) and four sub-tables starting on cell A2 of every sheet-one for each year (highlighted in the screenshot below).

Normally we'd have to bring in each sub-table and union them, but what if you have tens or hundreds of sub-tables? Now we can use a wildcard union to read in sub-tables in one step.