Reference lines in Tableau can serve a number of purposes. They can provide a constant point of reference, display an average, represent a dynamic, field-driven value, heck, they can even keep your axis length fixed to help users limit data comprehension issues due to change blindness.
So you’re building a pie chart, huh? You’ve ignored all the naysayers and pie chart haters and you’re going to build it anyways. Good for you!
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.
Tableau's default method for relating tables of data on shared columns is now Relationships. The previous default was joins. Despite looking outwardly similar, these approaches have some key differences.
Do you need to create a calculation in Tableau which differentiates between weekends and weekdays?
In the past, we’ve covered how to write a calculation which allows you to compare today to the same day of the year in Tableau. In that scenario, we used the day of year number for comparison. That works well if January 27th from this year should be compared to January 27th of last year (for example). However, what if you want to compare so that equal days of week are being compared?
Worksheet filters provide Tableau Desktop developers and Tableau consumers to customize the worksheet they are looking out. There are a number of distinct worksheet filter types in Tableau. If you want to learn more about the filtering types and how you can utilize them, check out the video below!
Recently, I received an email from a blog follower wondering if a single field in Tableau could categorize data at multiple date unit levels (e.g. year, quarter and month). With a bit of calculation creativity, we were able to write a calculation which…
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.
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.
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.
The numerous grouping options in Tableau Prep are one of the best parts of the tool. In addition to manual grouping, you can group based on common characters, pronunciation and spelling. However, scrolling through existing values and grouped values to determine if the groups which Tableau Prep created were a good fit can be cumbersome.
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.
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.