By: Eric Parker
Eric Parker lives in Seattle and has been teaching Tableau and Alteryx since 2014. He's helped thousands of students solve their most pressing problems. If you have a question, feel free to reach out to him directly via email. You can also sign up for a Tableau Office Hour to work with him directly!
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Blending is nearly as old as Tableau Desktop itself. Executing a blend in Tableau is a method for relating data from multiple different tables so it can be analyzed together. For instance, a sales value and a quota.
Many people believe a blend is similar to a join or relationship. You pick one or more fields to relate multiple tables on, and Tableau connects the tables horizontally.
However, blending is not quite the same as joins or relationships. One of the key attributes of a blend is that Table aggregates secondary tables to match the size of the primary table. As a result, you can end up with situation which look like this.
That asterisk occurs when Tableau is trying to aggregate dimensional values from a secondary table in a blend. Check out this video to learn more and how you can solve this issue.
Need to learn more about blends? This is just the tip of the iceberg! Check out our webinar recording of Data Blending in Tableau: How it Works and When You Need It to get the full scoop.
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