Groups are an incredible feature in Tableau, but they are limited. For instance, you can’t leverage a group for a blend or cross-database join.

If you need to use the output of a group for data preparation, you will probably want to turn it into a calculated field. Rather than doing it slowly by hand, why not leverage a quick calculation which can speed up the process?

Check out the video below to learn how you can easily turn a group into a calculated field in Tableau.

First off, let me give a huge shoutout to my colleague Klaudia for inspiring this post. She put together a dashboard format for a client we work for and I found it to look so sharp that I’ve adopted it for my own uses!

If you are looking for some inspiration for how you can make your Tableau business dashboards more visually intuitive, you’ll want to check this out! I walk through all the design steps in the video below.

Dealing with nulls in Tableau calculations requires a bit of specialized product knowledge. For instance you can’t write IF [Dimension] = NULL THEN “X” END. If you want to reference a null value, you need to use ISNULL. If you want to replace a null value with another value, you can use IFNULL. If you want to replace all nulls with zero, you can use ZN. Check out the video below to learn how these functions work and learn which kinds of use cases they are most helpful for.

I was recently reading the book Principles by Ray Dalio (who founded one of the largest hedge funds in the world). He has an interesting mind and displayed a chart for visualizing data over time series, ranking values against each other. He mentioned that good thinkers are generally able to identify and visualize trends well. His chart looked something like this.