How often do you build a Tableau dashboard and feel like it has too many filters? This happens to me all the time! You don't know what to do with them, right? Make two rows of filters? Ugh. Make a massive column? That's a lot of screen real estate. Add show/hide buttons so users can toggle a layout container on and off the page? That doesn't seem ideal either. What if someone doesn't realize they can show filters?
Donut Charts are a very visually-appealing chart type, used to show part-to-whole relationships. They’re simple and effective, and are a great tool to add to your dashboarding arsenal. While they’re not a built-in chart type in Tableau (unlike a bar chart, pie chart, or line graph), we can build them with a few extra steps!
Let's say you want to filter a Tableau worksheet to only contain data from the latest date in the data set. That's pretty simple if the latest date is consistently today or yesterday. You can just use a relative date filter! But what if the most recent date in the data set is less consistent?…
Getting the structure of our data correct for Tableau Desktop can make a huge difference. Tableau is pretty picky about the way it wants our data to be formatted. Generally, each column should be a new dimension or measure.
Joins in Tableau Desktop are one of the primary methods for combining multiple tables of data horizontally. One of the great things about joins are their flexibility! You can choose if you'd like to keep all data from both tables in your result set, or if you prefer to keep only matching records.
Tableau is a great tool for operationalizing time period comparisons. One of the classics is comparing quarters.
For example, you might want to know how this quarter compares to last quarter. That's a great way to compare values if your business isn't very seasonal. However, what if you sell sunscreen? You can bet that comparing fall to summer is always going to look like a bummer.
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.