If you are coming to Tableau from the world of Excel, make sure your skills translate!
Excel and Tableau have a long history of being complementary tools. While there are functions that can be performed in both tools, they both have their own strengths and weaknesses.
Do you want to keep all data associated with a value which has multiple records in a data set? Maybe it's how many students attended multiple schools, how many patients visited a hospital multiple times or how many customers made multiple purchases.
Do you need to calculate tenure in Tableau? You're probably looking for the DATEDIFF function! You indicate your date unit, a start date, an end date and let Tableau do it's thing. Simple as that, right?
Not necessarily!
One of my favorite, underrated visuals in Tableau is to compare running sum values year over year! It is a great tool to compare student enrollments, sales and even personal achievements like miles run or silver coins found metal detecting! :-P
Would it be helpful to see how the running sum of values for this year stacks up to previous years? Check out this video to learn how you can compare cumulative values year over year!
How are things performing at your organization this month? How does that compare to the past? What if the best historical comparison isn't last month, but this month last year?
If you want to use Tableau to compare month to date performance for this month to the same month last year, you can! However, it's going to require a few custom calculations to get there.
Many organizations report against a fiscal calendar which doesn't align with the standard calendar year. If your organization's fiscal year starts in October or July, you know what I'm talking about.
We've created a handful of resources documenting how to use calculations to monitor year to date performance compared to prior year to date performance, but we've never addressed how to do this if you're operating on fiscal years.
Have you ever spent waaaaay too long trying to format a number in Tableau? Did you ever change a number format but see no change in your worksheet? These little things can be maddening!
Measure Names and Measure Values - they seem to be everywhere! In your data pane, appearing magically when building certain graphs and views… But what exactly are they for?
Measure Names and Measure Values are Tableau generated fields that allow us to reference all the measures in our worksheet.
Tableau is a fantastic data visualization tool, but memorizing some of the initial data visualization rules is hard. It might only take a few clicks to create a scatter plot or a highlight table, but you need to know exactly *which* clicks to make in order to create those charts.
Tableau Sets are custom fields which allow you to define subsets of data. They can be used in a variety of ways to make charts more intuitive, interactive, and functional!
One of my favorite, underutilized charts is a dot plot! A dot plot is like a 2-D Scatter Plot and it's great for visualizing ranges of data. Often, I'll pop an average line on the chart for reference so the user can compare across categories as well. I hope this chart type serves you well!
“How do you display counts in Tableau?"
I accidentally stumbled upon this popular Google search question and it looks like a lot of people are inputting this query!
It turns out, there are multiple ways to display counts in Tableau. Which method is right for you all depends on what you're trying to display the count of.
Tableau Prep is a powerful tool for cleaning and shaping data. One of its weaknesses is that it can be slow on a desktop computer. There are a number of reasons for that (computer memory limitations, size of data source, complexity of steps, etc.). One of the ways that Tableau Prep conducts these performance issues is to sample your data automatically.
Have you ever tried to add a label to the end of a stacked bar chart in Tableau? I'm guessing it didn't work the way you wanted!
When you add a measure to the Label section of the Marks card, it adds a label to each section of stacked bar chart rather than an overall label for the entire bar.
Sometimes, users need to see the same data multiple ways to develop thorough insights. Providing your user the ability to switch worksheet types (e.g. swap a map for a bar chart) is a great way to provide them with flexibility in analysis!
One of my favorite tricks in Tableau dashboarding is to allow users to swap worksheets! You can hook a parameter up to a calculation which filters/swaps between multiple sheets in a Tableau dashboard.
There are three certainties in life; death, taxes and running out of space on your dashboard.
We've all been there, right? Our business users want to squeeze "just one more sheet" onto an already crowded view. If that sheet is a bar chart, I've got a space saving tip for you. Could you overlay the dimensional labels at the beginning of the bars to save some space?
