When I first started using Tableau, I swear that I spent more time trying to unhide stuff I accidentally removed than I did actually building dashboards. Maybe you’re in the same boat or know someone who is. Hopefully we can help you out if that’s the case! Check out the video below to learn how to unhide almost anything in Tableau Desktop.
All in Tableau How-Tos
So you want to build a market depth chart in Tableau. huh? Let’s start by quickly defining the purpose of a market depth chart and then we’ll look at the steps for how to build one in Tableau.
Sometimes when I’m creating summary tiles for Tableau dashboards, I like to add arrows or percent increases/decreases to let consumers know how current values relate to the comparison period.
Have you ever run into a situation in Tableau where you add labels to the ends of your lines, only to find out those labels are overlapping the lines and are borderline illegible?
Waterfall charts are a powerful visual you can create in Tableau to demonstrate the running, cumulative effect of positive and negative values over time. They are fun way to spice up your dashboards, but it can be difficult to remember each of the exact steps you need to follow.
Did you know there are at least 3 different types of groups you can create? Which of the types is a best fit for you depends largely on your situation and data.
Have you ever noticed how axes in Tableau worksheets are always at the bottom? That can feel counterintuitive to end users. They have to go all the way to the bottom of the worksheet and read the axes to determine what the worksheet is trying to communicate.
In Excel, you can easily highlight an entire row in a spreadsheet by selecting a row and adding fill to the background of the cells. How about Tableau however? Tableau highlight tables get you close, but one of their shortcoming is they don’t highlight the background of dimensional headers.
I recently received an email from a blog reader who was trying to solve a problem I’ve come across several times. He was representing populations on a map of the world in a chart that looked something like this.
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.
I recently learned something crazy about Tableau. If you add a total to your worksheet and then try to filter another worksheet by selecting a total value, it doesn’t work! Maybe you’ve experienced this too and thought you were crazy. The unexpected solution to this problem is to add a separate total worksheet to a dashboard to use as a filter action. Tableau’s own documentation recommends this.
Last week, I published a blog post about the power of compound interest and embedded related a Tableau Public dashboard (also below).
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?
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.
There’s an age old trick for Tableau Server published content I was recently reminded of and wanted to share. You can quickly and easily export a pdf, png or csv of a Tableau worksheet or dashboard by appending the file type at the end of a Tableau Server URL string. However, there are a few tricks to be aware of so let’s take a look.
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.