Creating calculated fields in Tableau Prep is pretty straightforward. Editing them isn’t. The first time I wanted to edit a calculated field in the product I had a moment of hesitation.
Tableau Prep is a powerful tool but it can’t help solve every data preparation scenario. We focus a lot of our time and effort on what it can do, but we thought it would be worthwhile to cover what it can’t do (yet).
Joins can be a sticky business, especially if…
● You haven’t used them much before.
● You are working with data that is new to you.
● You don’t trust your data cleanliness.
Remember the Attribute function? It returns a value if there is only a single value for a result set, otherwise it returns an asterisk.
As you likely know from using Table Calculations in Tableau, they only compute against the marks displayed in a worksheet. Check out this webinar in you need a refresher.
That means when a filter is applied to the worksheet, a table calculation will update to reflect only the data present in the worksheet.
Tableau Prep is a great tool for dealing with messy or unorganized data. After understanding the basics, one of the first things I found myself wondering was “does Tableau Prep have the ability to unpivot data?”. It has a pivot feature but does not have an unpivot or transpose feature at this point. However, there is a workaround.
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Have you received the error “Cannot mix aggregate and non-aggregate arguments with this function.” in Tableau before?
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.
When you have so many fields in your Tableau workbook that a scroll bar appears in your data window, you need to find a way to organize your fields.
“How do you calculate a headcount at a moment in time when you only have a start and end date?” I’ve gotten this question several times. My answer used to be “Ideally, you’d want a row of data for an individual for every possible date unit you’d want to count them at.”
If you haven’t had a chance to check it out for yourself yet, I want to introduce you to Tableau’s latest breakthrough, the “viz in tooltip”. Let me show you how this works and why it’s valuable.
There will likely be times when you want to calculate performance year to date versus the same time period prior year to date.