How to Automate a Tableau Prep Flow

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Description:
Tableau Prep is a powerful tool for cleaning, structuring and preparing data for analysis in Tableau Desktop. The Tableau Prep Builder software provides the ability to create data workflows which can be run manually. That's fine when data is updated infrequently, but it doesn't work well when data needs to be refreshed every day or every hour.

The good news is that you can set up your Tableau Prep Flows to run automatically! It's going to require pointing the output to Tableau Server, publishing the flow to Tableau Server, and connecting your Tableau Workbooks to the Server-based data source.

Ready to turn your hard work in Tableau Prep into an automated workflow? Check out this video to learn the key steps!

Resources:

Chapters:
0:00 Scenario Background
2:30 Tableau Prep Builder Flow
3:20 Publish Output to Server
4:20 Prep File Types
5:30 Tableau Prep Classes
5:55 Publish Tableau Prep Flow to Server
6:50 Tableau Prep Server Interface
8:00 Schedule New Task
10:05 Connect Tableau Workbook to Server Data

[paulwyatt]

Hi Eric, Thanks for the video. I love all of your One Number blogs and videos. Could I suggest that you might state the Tableau requirements up front in future videos if you're not using a 'basic' tableau server installation. Many established users will not have the Tableau Data Management (TDM) plug-in upgrade required to schedule a PREP flow which may come as a disappointment at the 8:00min mark of your video.

Whilst there are alternative ways to automate PREP without TDM, they are not worth it in my opinion so I personally use PREP in the discovery phase and then use SQL in the DB to replace the PREP work for a production model.

Take care Eric, I really look forward to your informative and inspiring videos dropping every week.

Regards, Paul

[uismdoratamari]

At 2:17
What is that type of table called and how do you make it?
I have been trying to do this but every time it would cross the variables and I could not just get a simple overview! Any help would be super appreciated. Thank you!

[hi-xyhq]

Heyyy I connect my flow to Amazon Athena and published it with embedded cadential. I scheduled the flow but it fail to refresh I seem like i have to open the flow and log in to Athena again. Do you know how to fix that?

[ksyoo]

Thanks, really solve my problem! Success by follow the steps, hoho~

[shaq-wuql]

Hi your video is amazing and very helpful. Can you make a video using Tableau Server in place of Tableau Cloud with Tableau Prep and Google sheet ?

[andrecsilveira]

Do I have to purchase a Data management license to have Tableau Prep Conductor? I do not have the schedule task option

[alamarridi]

Hi Eric, I have external excel file connected to my Flow, but the flow wont automatically reads the changes I make in the excel file

[reyvincentalcantara]

HI. I have multiple flows for example, I have flow 1 and flow 2 then I will use flow 1 and 2 output to flow 3 how can I do the automated process of this one.

I have to use the last output which is coming from flow 3 in dashboard

[juanguerrero]

Hello amazing video. Is there a way to use like python and reach any API to schedule the flows?

[AbhilashRajagopal-gifm]

Can we remove duplicates from a column in prep ?

[DebayanKar]

9:02 I want to create a custom schedule with 15 mins intervals, how to do that ?

[gkgk]

How would this be possible without the Data management add on as that is an additional cost?

[kelechionyenachi]

When I run the flow in prep I get the pop up saying "Tableau prep output with the same name already exist. Do you want to replace them?" I click replace and the flow runs. The flow fails when running from the server and I believe that pop up is why. How do i automate around that or get the automation to automatically just overwrite

[pw]

Let's say we have created a data flow using live MySQL database connections and then we publish the data source using the data flow on server. Once we run the data flow on server, the newly created datasource will have a live connection to mysql or it is published as an extract? If the new data in available in MySQL database then how will that reflect in the datassource published using dataflow?

[yogeshhogale]

Hi if my input files get updated daily then by running flow in tableau prep how does new files get updated pls help

[karolinaroz]

I was trying to publish flow but I can't change an Authentication method :( What could be the prob;em?