Tableau is optimized to perform date comparisons and calculations relative to a standard calendar. If your organization’s year starts on the first of a month other than January, Tableau can still handle that relatively well. The flexibility breaks down when the calendar year doesn't start on the first of the month and the comparison periods (e.g. semester or trimester) don't align with Tableau's pre-built periods (quarters, months, weeks).
All in Data
I’ve known for several years that Google Sheets is the only data source which Tableau Public can automatically refresh for users. Until a few weeks ago, I had never tried to set up a living connection between Tableau Public and a routinely updated Google Sheet. It turns out that Tableau Public is good at holding up it’s end of the bargain, but keeping Google Sheets updated isn’t as simple.
My Seattle Mariners fandom was cemented in the 1990s watching Ken Griffey Junior, Randy Johnson, Edgar Martinez, Joey Cora, Alex Rodriguex and others tear up the American League. Some of my fondest and earliest memories are attending games at the Kingdome with my dad.
While working with personally identifiable information, you may need to suppress sensitive data. Let’s say that you are working with healthcare data and want to suppress patient names.
I was recently working with a client when we hit a roadblock. We came across a situation where we needed to create a multi-row formula and Tableau Desktop is not equipped to do that. Let me walk you through the situation.
LISTAGG is a powerful SQL command to denormalize rows data.
But, what if you don’t have access to SQL or just need a quick way to accomplish this?
I was recently faced with a challenge when working for a client. We needed a simple way to provide row-level permissions to hundreds of Tableau Server users for 4 million+ rows of data. The data took place over 300+ sites. Some sites might only have a handful of users that needed access to view while others might have 40.
Tableau is a great data visualization tool that has some data manipulation capabilities. To get the most out of Tableau, it's helpful to have some SQL skills to prepare data. Join us for the 30-minute recording of our recent webinar below to learn how SQL can improve your Tableau experience!
When teaching, I often get asked some variation of the question, “How many rows of data can Tableau handle?”. It’s a well-intended question but it’s incomplete. Tableau technically doesn’t have a row count limitation, but row count is one of the factors that can impact performance.
“Relationships” are a new and powerful way to connect tables of data in Tableau and are included in the release of Tableau Desktop 2020.2.
One of the frustrating data formats that can make data unusable in Tableau is report-formatted spreadsheet that have headers with following blanks.
Data scaffolding allows you to generate missing data for visualization purposes.
In June, 2018 I wrote a blog post about three things Tableau Prep couldn’t do. One of those was the ability to transpose (unpivot) data. That is no longer the case.
Working with data that isn’t clean can be a pain. One of the most frequent data issues I come across is dealing with duplicated rows of data.
My grandparents have a beach house in Island County and every 4th of July there is a big parade and community get together. One of the events is the “Penny Hunt”. The adults scatter a bunch of coins (of varying denominations) in the sand for the kids to search for. As kids, my brother and I got fed up with blindly digging in the sand so we convinced our dad to get us a cheap metal detector. I remember pulling in $40 the first summer we put it to use. Not bad for a couple of kids.
Nope.
If you need to pivot data from a SQL table for use in Tableau, Tableau Desktop’s default pivot feature can’t help you.