Breakout concatenated field into rows not columns within Tableau

Question

I have two fields that contain concatenated strings. The first field contains medical codes and the second field contains the descriptions of those codes. I don't want to break these into multiple fields because some of them would contain hundreds of splits. Is there any way to break them into a row each like below? The code and description values are separated by a semicolon (;)

code   description
-----  ------------ 
80400  description1
80402  description2

A sample of the data:

Within Tableau Desktop you won't be able to achieve this. Have a look at the new Tableau Prep Tool and this would be able to achieve this! Otherwise you will need a transformation step using a proper ETL tool/code — smb

Siva Siva · Accepted Answer · 2018-05-11T09:55:51

One way is you can custom split two columns at ; which will create separate columns for every entry then you can pivot code columns and description columns separately.

One issue will be you can't guarantee if every code is mapped to correct description.

One more way is export data to excel sheet and then split and pivot the columns and then match the code and description, Then take the excel as datasource to the tableau.

Breakout concatenated field into rows not columns within Tableau

1 Answers