Great tool for data cleaning, manipulation and consolidation--and a huge time saver

Because Tableau has such a great and active user-base, most real issues that we face with Prep can easily be solved by searching for your issue on Tableau's support site. There is likely someone else out there who has experienced your issue, and so many willing users out there willing to help share their workarounds. I have never had an issue arise to the point that I need urgent support with a live helper, so I cannot speak on that.

Tableau Prep is a great tool for consolidating budget with actual data. When joining sources, it gives you all the insight and transparency you need when joining data sources and any cleaning/aggregation needs to be done. If financial data comes from multiple sources (ex. a budget platform and an accounting software), Prep allows your organization to build a flow to consolidate the two sources so that everyone can open a workbook and begin from the same point. Once flows are built (especially when connected live), refreshing reports can be done with a click of a button. The capabilities Prep has to manipulate, clean and join data goes far beyond what was possible in Workbook. The extracts that are created as a single output allow working with multiple data sources in a single workbook to be a lot smoother and quicker.