UNIONS

Having successfully cleaned the fields, you can now merge the three different tables into one. They all contain the same fields of the same data type, and you can therefore combine them into one table that contains all the rows from each of the three regions. As before, you apply a union to achieve that.

In the Flow pane, drag the input step orders_south_ onto the cleaning step Dates & Fields, and release the mouse when it is above the New Union field (see Figure 10.16).

Figure 10.16 Dropping one step onto the New Union field of another step.

As you can see, a new step (Union 1) is added to the flow. To complete the process, also drop the third table (Orders_West) onto Union 1.

Now the data of all three regions is in one table. Click the union step to see the result. You should be able to see that most fields were automatically merged.

However, there are a few cases where the fields in the tables had different names, which you overlooked earlier when inspecting the data...