One of my favorite and most-often used date filters in Tableau is a range of dates with dynamic start and end dates.
For example, you choose a range of dates (last 7 days, last 14 days, last 30 days, etc.) and then create dynamic start and end date filters that meet that criteria. This is a great way to provide a pre-selected filter range for your users but still give them ultimate control over the exact date range they want to see.
Let's take a look at Tableau Pulse!
Tableau Pulse is a new tool available on Tableau Cloud that uses AI to track metrics over time and give you an easily-shareable and digestible snapshot of your data. There are a few quirks to the system that we wanted to walk you through in this week's video.
One of the primary ways we combine multiple tables of data in Tableau Prep is with joins! Joins allow us to merge multiple tables of data horizontally on a common key.
One of the things that distinguishes joins in Tableau Prep from Tableau Desktop are all the join types we can create! In Tableau Desktop, we're limited to Left, Right, Inner and Outer joins. In Tableau Prep we have those four options with the addition of Left Unmatched, Right Matched and All Unmatched. Those unmatched join types provide greater flexibility to create customized workflows and identify values which did not match in our join clause.
Publishing a Tableau dashboard is crucial part of the dashboard-building process. This is often a step that comes with a sense of accomplishment as we begin sharing our work with others.
But with all the options available to us when we publish our dashboards, how do you know whether you've done it correctly? Will you end-users have adequate access to the data? Do they have the permissions they need to view it? Do we need to add filters or selections?
Stacked bar charts are a brilliant visual for displaying how individual segments contribute to the overall value of a category, and how a category ranks in relation to other categories. Like all data visualizations however, it has some weaknesses.
One of the biggest weaknesses of a stacked bar chart is that it's hard to compare bar segments when they don't have a shared baseline. Comparing the first bar segment is straightforward, but comparing the 3rd or 5th segment is cumbersome.
Tableau's Dashboard Actions are powerful tools that we can use to add significantly increased levels of interactivity to our dashboards. Interactive dashboards are part of what makes Tableau such an engaging product for our data analysis.
Of all the actions in Tableau, Filter Actions are some of the most common and useful. They allow us to click on one worksheet and filter another, or filter a worksheet on another dashboard entirely!
Do you want to label just the first and last point in a graph in Tableau? For a line graph, that's simply a couple clicks away. But for a bar chart or any other type of graph, it might be a bit more involved.
Our go-to method for labeling just the first and last points is to write a table calculation utilizing the FIRST() and LAST() functions and to drop that on the label tab in the Marks card.
Want to learn how? Check out this video!
Where do you begin with Excel? It's a tool so widely used that everyone assumes you know how to work your way around it! But for those of us just starting out, it can be really intimidating to work out where to begin.
This video will walk you through 12 essential Excel skills that everyone should know, from Beginners to Experts! With these 12 skills, you'll be equipped to get started on your first Excel workbook, or to upgrade the workbook you're working on.
A fundamental component of Tableau Prep is the ability to clean messy data. One of the best ways to do that is by creating groups! However, creating groups can be confusing. How does Tableau Prep decide what to name a group? For example, if you group "Boise" and "Boise City" together into a single city name, which does Tableau Prep choose? Well, that all depends on the grouping method you select.
Automated Groups: If you use automated groups (grouping on pronunciation, common characters, etc.) it will choose the more populous value. So if there are 100 rows for "Boise" and 5 rows for "Boise City", the group name will default to "Boise".
FIXED Level of Detail Functions (LODs) let you specify the level of detail you want to aggregate a particular measure at. This allows us to work around the natural limitations of the level of detail in the worksheet we're working in.
FIXED LODs are a great place to start as they are the definitive, essential LOD. The two others (EXCLUDE and INCLUDE) are less common, but functional in their own unique ways. If you want to simplify and just learn one LOD type, FIXED is the one for you!
Do you want to build a customizable, dynamic date range filter in Tableau?
For example, imagine you want the filter to default to the last 14 days ending with today's date, but you'd like your user to be able to adjust the end date and number of days in that filter.
That combination of functionality is not available out-of-the-box in Tableau, but with some creativity, parameters and calculations, it's possible!
How do you add a Quarter and Year list filter in Tableau? By default, Tableau lets us add a Quarter Number filter (e.g. Q1), but getting a Quarter and Year filter list isn't a standard option! As a result, we need to workaround this a bit with three possible options.
Which one works best for you depends on your use-case, but all three will be helpful to know in your Tableau work.
One of the primary purposes of a dashboard title is to provide context for users. It should give them a sense of what they are looking at, and what they are looking for.
My favorite way to add value to a dashboard title is to have it reflect filter selections. For example instead of saying "How is our hospital system performing?" it could say "How is Trinity Northern performing?" when the dashboard is filtered to a single hospital.
Do you want to incorporate password protection for your Tableau Public Dashboards?
Using a parameter and a random string generator, you can get pretty close! While not totally comprehensive, it's a great element to incorporate into your dashboards if you want to keep them somewhat secure without investing in the Tableau Cloud services for a wide viewer base.
Filtering on a date range in Tableau is pretty straightforward, right? But how about if you want to filter on that date range AND you want a comparison date range filtered at the same time? That's trickier.
For example, you set a filter from January 1st to March 15th 2024 and you want a comparison period of January 1st to March 15th 2023 to automatically be set, how do you do that?
Need to hire a Tableau Developer? We can help!
Hiring someone is a daunting task! How do you find the right person? How do you know if they'll be a good fit? How do you assess their experience level?
We've partnered with Tableau since 2014 to facilitate training sessions and consult on Tableau projects. During that time we've trained thousands of users and helped hundreds of organizations maximize their use of Tableau.
We're often asked to help those organizations with the hiring process. In this video, we've distilled some of our biggest takeaways that can help you find the right candidate for your team!
