Traditionally the set feature in Tableau is used to create a subset of predefined values. Those may be handpicked (i.e. How do these 5 products perform regionally?) or they may be chosen conditionally (i.e. Where are our top 100 customers by revenue located?). They are generally used to create predefined values you can filter on.
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I was working with a client recently and needed to do find and replace in a Tableau calculation. While Tableau does have a native FIND() function, it just finds if a character string exists and tells you what position that string starts at. Not particularly helpful when it comes to replacing.
A client recently challenged me with the question, “How could I show a bar chart in Tableau that shows values for the top 10 displayed as 10 individual bars but group all the rest of the values into a single bar called “other”…
Totals in Tableau are notoriously rigid. You can’t add two totals lines; one for summarized values and one for averaged values, in the same worksheet. You can have one, the other, or allow Tableau to use a field’s default aggregation for totals.
Imagine you are working on a project where you want to allow users to only see data that’s applicable to them. A simple example of this is a restaurant chain. You might create a sales report where you want a General Manager to only see the data for their store but not others.
Showing the relationship between two values over a variety of categories or time periods is always a challenge.
When using Tableau, you might occasionally create a worksheet that uses dimensions only. Imagine you created a worksheet displaying an organizational hierarchy that looks like this:
When embarking on a data communication project, you might not always have all the data you need to create a prototype in a timely manner. I often generate realistic, placeholder data sources so I can design a dashboard and get feedback, even if the actual data isn’t ready for display yet.
Here's an interesting challenges; how do you compare this year's values to the average of the previous 3 years in Tableau? The complex solution requires the use of the FIXED level of detail function. Watch the above video to follow along and learn how to perform this calculation.
Imagine you have a busy worksheet in Tableau that looks like this:
Each line represents a single facility and displays that facility’s overtime hours. Imagine you want to filter to only keep the trends for the 3 facilities with the highest overtime hours from the most recent date BUT you also want that filter to be dynamic so when you update the data there might be a new top 3.
If you have a data set that updates irregularly, figuring out how to filter to show only the latest data is difficult. Relative Date Filters are great but only work well if you have a set time you are filtering to like “today” or “yesterday”. If your latest data could be today, yesterday, or two days ago depending on the refresh schedule, things get trickier.
Yes, you can! Check out the image below for an example.
If you've ever tried to compare part of your data to the whole in Tableau (and give your users flexibility to change the view), you might think it's not possible. However, with a combination of parameters and calculations, you can give users the ability to compare a partial selection to the whole, original value.
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.