Normalize (reformat) cross-tab data for Tableau without using Excel

Question

Tableau generally works best when input data is in \"normalized\" format, rather than cross-tab. This is also referred to as converting from \"wide format\" to \"long format

Answer 1

If you are comfortable with command lines and the Unix style of combining small tools using pipes, check out the open source csvkit toolsuite.

You can combine these utilities in many ways to get different effects, so the exact sequence of steps depends on your datasets (that's the point of the tools after all).

But for reshaping tasks, you could use csvcut to pull out columns of interest, csvgrep to pull out rows of interest and cvsstack to combine multiple csv files into one longer one, along with the -g and -n options to add a grouping field.

There are several other useful commands, and if you are familiar with Unix or linux, you can figure out what they do quickly just from the command names.