When it comes to displaying data over time, it's easy to fall into the trap that you should always use some form of line graph. While line graphs are a great default when displaying chronological data, they aren't always your best option!
Aggregations are functions which allow you to consolidate numerous rows of values into a single output. SUM, AVG, MIN, MAX, COUNT and COUNTD are some of the most used aggregations in Tableau.
Aggregations play an important role in Tableau calculations. If they aren't used properly, calculations will return incorrect results!
A huge benefit of using joins in Tableau is that we can combine data from multiple tables into a single table for analysis. When those tables are in different databases, it can be a little tricky to work out where to start. If you know how to join tables within the same database, that's great! Cross-database joins only take a few more steps to execute, and I'll walk you through them in today's video.
Every application seems to have it's own syntax for IF logic statements, right? SQL, Excel and Tableau IF statements all look a little different.
Check this video out for a deep dive into the world of logical operators, simple and advanced IF statements in Tableau!
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.