From the course: Tableau 10 Essential Training

Joining related fields with inconsistent names - Tableau Tutorial

From the course: Tableau 10 Essential Training

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Joining related fields with inconsistent names

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- When you create a Tableau Workbook from a data source that contains multiple related tables, it's very likely that the fields that the tables have in common will have consistent naming. However, if the fields that you want to use to join two tables have different names, you need to do the process manually. In this movie, I will show you how to join a pair of tables that share a data field in common, but have inconsistent names. I have Open Tableau and, I haven't created any workbooks yet. Instead I am here on the start screen. So I'll go over to the connect panel, over here to the left, and click Excel. Doing so displays the open dialogue box. You should navigate to the chapter two folder of the exercise files collection, and double click "different names". That's the Excel workbook here. I'll go ahead and double click that. And when I do, Tableau creates the Workbook and displays the three sheets that I have available: Order Details, Products, and PropertyInfo. The first thing I need to do is add my sheets, or my data sources, so I'll double click "Products" to add that to the "drag sheets here" area and there you can see that I have all of that table stated together. Next, I will add order details by double clicking it. When I do, Tableau adds the order details table, but it indicates that it can't find a match in field names. However, I happen to know that I have two fields that contain exactly the same data. That means that I can create an InnerJoin. In this case, the field that I want to use is Product ID, that's in the products table, which is where I'm looking right now, so I'll click "Product ID", and then, over under "Order Details" I'll hover my mouse pointer over the field, or, this box just below "Order Details", click the down arrow, and from here I can click "Prod ID", which is just a shortened form of "Product ID". And when I click that and close the dialogue box you'll see that the join has been created and my data appears correctly in the bottom of the screen. And I'll go ahead and double click "Property Info" to add it as well. And that join worked correctly. Now I can go to sheet one, and create my visualization. I'll just do that very quickly, I'll add "Product Category" to the "drop field here" area and I will add "Quantity" to the text area. So that means that I now have my product categories and the quantity of items listed for each one. To re-cap: I was able to create a visualization based on related tables even though two of the tables have the same data, the fields had different names. By identifying them manually, I could create the join, and then create my visualization.

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