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!
Do you need to publish public Tableau reports but suppress small populations because of sensitivity concerns?
If you work in healthcare, education or another government entity, there's a good chance your Tableau reports contain sensitive information that needs to be suppressed. Many organizations we work with need to suppress populations when they are less than five. For example, if we filtered a courts dashboards to see how many court cases there were in Whatcom county for 12-14 year old, Pacific Islander females in 2017 and there were three cases, we would need to suppress that figure because it's less than five.
We have a handful of Tableau tricks that can help with this! We can write a calculation to convert small values to a 0 or -1 and use number formatting to replace those values with a letter or icon.
Ready to learn how to suppress small sample sizes in Tableau? Check out this video!
Disclaimer: Please note that if you are publishing to Tableau Public, that is technically a public server hosted by Tableau. You should restrict download access so no one can view your underlying data, but you might also want to consider using Tableau Embedded Analytics instead.
Need help with Tableau? Sign up for an office hour to work with Eric! You can also check out our upcoming classes for a Tableau deep dive!
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