A few months ago, a blog reader, Om Parekh, reached out to me with a question. He was working on a project where he needed to compare each day to the same day the previous year. For instance, how did the third Wednesday in February, 2020 compare to the third Wednesday in February, 2019?
All in Tableau Calculations
I was recently working on a project that incorporated building management. One aspect of the management of the buildings was to ensure that regular inspections were done on each floor of each building weekly.
Imagine you are asked the question, “How do this month’s sales compare to this same period from last year?” The simplest way to address this in Tableau would be to create some calculations.
Summary tiles are a great way to quickly communicate a few meaningful measures to your end users in a dashboard. Adding indicator arrows and allowing the colors of the summary tile to change can make them even more impactful.
You probably know that you can only set one number format per field in Tableau. That means that if you create a dynamic measure driven by a parameter (check out this blog post for details) you have to choose a number format. You could choose percent, decimal or currency, but you can’t get the format to swap.
Tableau is a fantastic tool because of its flexibility, but it takes some time to master. Nowhere is this more evident than date calculations. Many of our most read blog posts deal with topics like comparing Month to Date vs. Previous Month to Date.
I’ve gotten asked by multiple students if it’s possible to create a currency formatted field where the unit at the end of the number can be a K or M depending on the size of the value. Let’s imagine we are working with a chart like this…
It seems like just about every organization I work with has a little twist to the way they like their dashboards presented which varies slightly from the next organization. Recently, I was working with a team that largely provided their reporting on a weekly basis and displayed the Week End date in a DD-MMM format.
Imagine you are looking at a Tableau visual and want to to view the data translated into your local time zone. Transactions take place all over the country in different time zones but you’d like to see them all in local Pacific Time (for instance).
Level of Detail Expressions are one of the most powerful and least understood features in Tableau's calculation toolkit. Watch the below webinar recording to learn how they can be used to get more out of your Tableau workbooks.
I’ve been working with a healthcare system that wants to do a better job of understanding patient behavior. Better understanding will drive decisions around staffing, purchasing, shift breaks, essentially the entire way the system is managed.
Want to quickly learn all the main topics you need to know about Tableau Parameters? Check out the webinar recording above!
If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you know we’ve covered a number of date calculations including Year to Date vs. Previous Year to Date. 2020 brings a special challenge to calculations like this because it’s a leap year.
In teaching Tableau, I came across a visual I think is really fun and interesting.
I was recently asked by a student how they could compare several years of monthly values to the monthly average over that time span. They had something like this in mind…