Tableau Data Preparation – What is Project Maestro?

You may know Tableau as one of the best data visualization tools on the market today. However, you might not know that that Tableau will soon be releasing a new data import and preparation tool currently entitled Project Maestro.

Project Maestro provides different views of the data and a visual interface that will let you link different data sources together to see the changes that take place across the different views. It also provides advanced algorithms that will let you clean your data before importing. Additionally, Project Maestro will seamlessly integrate with Tableau, adding to their already stellar suite of data analysis tools.

Let’s take a look at more of the features that are reported to be coming in Project Maestro.

Pivot Tables

Maestro will provide users who lack SQL skills and database query experience with a visual interface that can create pivot tables. Pivot tables give users the ability to restructure or pivot the data in a way that makes the most sense for a given task.

Data Scrubbing

Previously, if you needed to clean your data before importing it into Tableau, you would need to export it to a CSV file and then open it with Excel and perform your data cleanup. Now you can fix data integrity problems without having to go through all the manual steps to export and import it into another piece of software.

With Project Maestro, you can fix issues where some of the entries are uppercase and some are lowercase as well as fix issues where some of the entries are spelled out and some are abbreviated. A great example of this would be the names of states, some of which may be spelled out while others may be abbreviated.  

Data Transformation Road Maps

Maestro will be able to provide a visual diagram of all of the manual data transformation steps that have been performed on the data. You can also click on any node in the diagram and see what the data looks like at any given point during the transformation process.

Data Profiles

Project Maestro provides data profiles with a state of the art graphical interface. The screen is divided into three different panes that show you everything about the data. The top pane contains the data transformation roadmap. The middle pane contains a data summary with charts and graphs depicting the frequency of different pieces of data. The bottom pane then contains the actual row-level data as it appears in the base data source.

Multiple Data Sources

Sometimes you need to combine data from different data sources in order to provide a complete representation of your work. Project Maestro will allow you to use wildcard unions to combine separate but related data sources by simply providing a path to the folder that contains the files. Maestro will combine them into one data source where they can then be easily manipulated and cleaned.

These are just some of the many features that are expected to be provided in project Maestro. The software is currently still in Beta but is drawing lots of excitement. You can even sign up to be a beta tester if you can’t wait to get your hands on the latest addition to the Tableau suite. The project release date is still unknown at this point, but the beta schedule is aggressive and new versions are coming out on a regular basis.

To learn more about Tableau’s Project Maestro or any of the other features available in this amazing visualization software, contact us today! At ONLC, we offer comprehensive Tableau training and certification courses that will help you further your personal and professional data analytics expertise!