Clean a messy export with Data Interpreter

The export has three title rows sitting above the real header.

BeginnerRead 4 minDoing: less than an hour6 steps

▶ Start

What you'll have at the end

A working Tableau data source with real field names, no leftover title row, blank columns, or stray sub-tables.

Before you start

You need

A workbook already connected to a spreadsheet export, whether from Excel, a text file, or a PDF, laid out for a person to read rather than for software to parse.

Not covered

Fixing wrong values inside the columns themselves, misspellings, duplicates, mismatched units, is a separate pass that comes once the sheet's shape is sound.

Leans on

Turn the export into a real data source

See what the connection reads first
Turn on Data Interpreter and check its work
Pick the table you actually want
Remove anything Data Interpreter left behind

Confirm it and keep it

Prove the fix with the totals
Save it so the fix sticks

Where to go next

Pick a join, a relationship, or a blend for two data sources

If you actually need the recap table's numbers alongside the detail rows, not only to check your work, that decision belongs there.

Your discrete date field turns a smooth trend into disconnected bars

If your cleaned date field still charts as separate bars instead of one line, fix that discreteness issue instead of repeating this cleanup.

Checked 26 Aug 2026

Part of the Tableau cookbook