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 follow him on LinkedIn or sign up for a Tableau Office Hour to work with him directly!
Joins in Tableau Desktop are one of the primary methods for combining multiple tables of data horizontally. One of the great things about joins are their flexibility! You can choose if you'd like to keep all data from both tables in your result set, or if you prefer to keep only matching records.
This flexibility can leave you sorting through a number of options including Left, Inner, Right and Outer joins. If you aren't sure which join type is right for you, check this video out to learn more about the Tableau join interface, join cardinality and join types!
For the record, here's how often I estimate that I use each of these join types in my work with clients.
Left - 60%
Inner - 25%
Outer - 10%
Right - 5%
Are you interested to build along, interact with the Tableau workbook, or learn more about joins? Check out these resoruces!
•Population and Electoral College Votes by State Practice Data Set
•Tableau Public Workbook Join Types Explained Workbook
•Joins vs. Relationships Webinar Recording
•Tableau Cross-Database Joins VIdeo
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