All in Tableau How-Tos

I have worked with a number of educational institutions, What I’ve found about those institutions, and many other organizations, is that many of them customize the way they track data over time. With a school it might be by trimester, with a restaurant chain it might be by period (there are 13 per year). These types of date fields require customized calculations.

I want to teach you a method I’ve used with various clients when they needed a flexible date field as part of their Tableau dashboard. In one example, I was working with a company that was using Tableau to create client-facing reports. Problem is, they had different granularities of data for different clients. For some clients they collected data daily, others monthly, and some yearly. What they needed was the ability to create a flexible dropdown that allowed them to change the level of date granularity in the view.

A few years ago I was working with a Fortune 500 restaurant chain that many of us frequent. What you probably don’t know is how often the rats frequent their restaurants too. The chain was trying to reduce the number of pest incidents at the worst offending stores, but was having trouble determining which stores were worst because their data was so messy.

I’ve pulled a set of data for the top pitchers in Major League Baseball in 2017. Let’s say we want to do an analysis to see which of the best pitchers got extra help from their teams and which didn’t.

I’ll start by creating a scatter plot displaying wins and losses by each pitcher. Pitchers with dark blue circles that are farther toward the top did not get much help from their teams. Pitchers with lighter circles that are closer to the bottom did.

A couple weeks ago I was teaching a course and received a question from a student. Her question was “How can I use Tableau to only show the most recent 3 transactions per customer?” I thought I’d have an answer for her quickly, but I was wrong.

My first thought was, let’s just use the “RANK” function to accomplish this. We’ll use it as a Table Calculation to determine the most recent transactions by customer. I was feeling confident until I saw this:

Tree maps are a data visualization used to communicate hierarchical values in a systematic way with nested rectangles. A lot of the tree maps I see look something like this:

I don’t know about you, but I don’t find this to be particularly informative or compelling. I prefer to use tree maps as a way to highlight a few relevant data points. Notice in the dashboard below how I use a tree map to highlight the top 10 items sold.