Creating a calendar visual in Tableau can be an effective way of communicating data-based information to your end user. For example, using a calendar in an effective way of seeing that sales are highest on Saturdays for this restaurant.
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Occasionally, you’ll come across scenarios in Tableau where you need more than the stock shapes that Tableau provides.
If you’ve ever received an image file and noticed the background isn’t transparent, it’s likely that has caused you a problem.
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I grew up in the Issaquah/Sammamish area of Washington State about 30 (depending on traffic 60) minutes east Seattle. When I was growing up there in the 1990s and 2000s I remember hearing comments from a lot of people that, “this area has the highest amount of high school students per capita anywhere in the state.”
Most programs like Excel, Tableau, Microsoft SQL Server and Alteryx have a built in Date Difference (DATEDIFF) function. This function is great at letting you set a unit of measurement (i.e. year, month, day) and calculate the difference between a start and an end point.
Imagine you are working on the following dashboard:
You’re pleased with where it’s at overall, but you’ve run into a dilemma. The dashboard helps answer the overall question “Where should we invest our marketing dollars?”, but it’s very hard to compare individual states. Maps are great for high-level geographic overviews but poor for comparing individual values.
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.
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.