Comparing one time period to another is a common use case in Tableau. In our experience, one of the best ways to do that is to overlay one on top of the other. The question is, how do you do that dynamically for both a current and comparison period?
Check out this video for one of our favorite homegrown solutions where you create a custom date field and a custom value label which allows you to overlay two time periods for comparison!
Tableau text tables are very powerful, but they're also pretty rigid, right? If you're a text table power user and you haven't checked out the Table Viz Extension, drop what you're doing!
A few things you can do with this versatile extension:
Create columns of varying widths
Add filters to a single column only
Dynamically color/format one column at a time
Set different mark types for each column Ready to add this to your toolkit?
Check out this video now!
How do Tableau URL Actions work? Let's dive into how they work, what they can do and some creative ways you can customize them.
URL Actions in Tableau provide the ability to generate open a tab in a browser based on a user selection. There are loads of ways to set them up too. You can reference a full URL field from your data source, you can append a field to the end of a static URL slug, heck you can even generate a form email from within Tableau using fields in your data source!
Do you ever get asked to build text tables for stakeholders? Do you feel like you could be driving more value than providing boring black and white text in rows and columns? 🫠
Well, we ran a webinar all about text tables and how to take them to the next level. In this webinar, we'll talk you through 12 tips for beginners to advanced Tableau users.
FIXED LODs are wonderful because they allow us to aggregate our measures at a chosen Dimension level, regardless of the level of detail of the worksheet. However, they aren't affected by Dimension Filters, because they're calculated before Dimension Filters are processed.
There are various scenarios where we need to work around that. We'll use Context Filters to help us where we need our LODs to be filtered, and we'll take a look at an example where you might not want your LOD to be filtered by your Dimension Filters.
Do you need to build a dashboard in Tableau Cloud but you don't know where to start? We've got you covered!
In this video, we cover connecting to data, building data visualizations, filtering, number formatting, worksheet formatting, Table Calculations, compiling a dashboard and publishing your work.
Join us for a thorough breakdown on how to build your first dashboard in Tableau Cloud!
Want to learn how to set up alerts on Tableau Cloud/Server so that you can track certain metrics in the dashboards or sheets you're following? All you need is a dashboard published to Tableau Cloud and a measure-based axis.
In this tutorial, we run through how to set up and customize data-driven alerts in Tableau. Data-driven alerts can be scheduled to run at the cadence of your choosing, so it's important to choose your timeframe wisely!
When you union tables in Tableau, you append two tables of data vertically. That means if you have two tables that are 1,000 rows each, the result of the union will be a single table that is 2,000 rows. Shared columns will align automatically, and unique columns will not.
Unions provide the ability to relate multiple tables that contain different data types of structures without worrying about granularity. Many times, fact tables that primarily consist of measures cannot be joined together because the join would lead to undesired row duplication.
Tableau's Data Analyst Certification can be a tricky one to prep for.
How will you get tested on Dashboarding? Will you have to build a dashboard? What will the Multiple Choice Questions be like? How much Tableau Prep or Cloud do you need to know?
I wrote the certification a few months back and I wanted to share some of my learnings to help you have the most successful test you can!
Creating custom date filters in Tableau takes some creativity and ingenuity. They can be especially tricky when they are used to control both aggregated and non-aggregated measures. Tableau is particular about how aggregated formulas are written.
If you want to create a custom date filter in Tableau that controls both aggregated and non-aggregated measures but you're struggling to write the formulas without errors, check out this video for some helpful tips!
Do you want to show and hide sheets on your dashboard with only a click? Dynamic Zone Visibility lets you do exactly that. This is far more dynamic than filter actions, as we can show or hide any number of sheets and their elements from a single interaction.
There are a few key steps to getting this right, so follow along to see how to implement this into your dashboards too!
One of my favorite and most-often used date filters in Tableau is a range of dates with dynamic start and end dates.
For example, you choose a range of dates (last 7 days, last 14 days, last 30 days, etc.) and then create dynamic start and end date filters that meet that criteria. This is a great way to provide a pre-selected filter range for your users but still give them ultimate control over the exact date range they want to see.
Let's take a look at Tableau Pulse!
Tableau Pulse is a new tool available on Tableau Cloud that uses AI to track metrics over time and give you an easily-shareable and digestible snapshot of your data. There are a few quirks to the system that we wanted to walk you through in this week's video.
One of the primary ways we combine multiple tables of data in Tableau Prep is with joins! Joins allow us to merge multiple tables of data horizontally on a common key.
One of the things that distinguishes joins in Tableau Prep from Tableau Desktop are all the join types we can create! In Tableau Desktop, we're limited to Left, Right, Inner and Outer joins. In Tableau Prep we have those four options with the addition of Left Unmatched, Right Matched and All Unmatched. Those unmatched join types provide greater flexibility to create customized workflows and identify values which did not match in our join clause.
Publishing a Tableau dashboard is crucial part of the dashboard-building process. This is often a step that comes with a sense of accomplishment as we begin sharing our work with others.
But with all the options available to us when we publish our dashboards, how do you know whether you've done it correctly? Will you end-users have adequate access to the data? Do they have the permissions they need to view it? Do we need to add filters or selections?
Stacked bar charts are a brilliant visual for displaying how individual segments contribute to the overall value of a category, and how a category ranks in relation to other categories. Like all data visualizations however, it has some weaknesses.
One of the biggest weaknesses of a stacked bar chart is that it's hard to compare bar segments when they don't have a shared baseline. Comparing the first bar segment is straightforward, but comparing the 3rd or 5th segment is cumbersome.
