Category Archives: Tips and Techniques

Tips, tricks, and how-tos on working with Tableau

KPIs and Floating Dashboards

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I haven’t seen this particular trick out there yet, it’s a fun one for the toolbox. When we’ve wanted to mix and match KPIs in a crosstab or text table, we’ve had to resort to multiple worksheets on a dashboard in a layout container, or a multiple axis crosstab. The former can result in various display issues because Tableau imposes certain border sizes, the latter has problems with performance due to the number of separate queries and computations that are necessary.

Tableau version 8 gives us floating dashboard elements with pixel-level precision for element location, and that gives us a third way to build text tables with KPIs.

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Upcoming Presentations

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I’ve been a little quiet the last couple of weeks as I’ve been head-down in a number of projects. A couple of those are webex presentations that are coming up on the next two Thursdays:

  • Grand Totals and Subtotals for Think Data Thursday, May 9, 12pm EDT. This will be a review of the material from my posts on Grand Totals, along with a couple of new ways to visualize and visually think about what Tableau is doing as it computes the Grand Totals. Register here. (free) And here’s the link to get the presentation materials: http://community.tableausoftware.com/thread/125847
  • Treemaps and Table Calculations for the Atlanta Tableau User Group, May 16th, 1pm EDT. This is a walkthrough of how version 8 does sorting, how treemaps are laid out, and making use of At the Level and Restarting Every in table calculations in order to do some useful mark labeling. Here’s the webex info:
Meeting Number: 716 384 179
Meeting Password: ATUG13

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To join this meeting (Now from mobile devices!)
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1. Go to https://nsc.webex.com/nsc/j.php?J=716384179&PW=NYTYyMmI1YTlj
2. If requested, enter your name and email address.
3. If a password is required, enter the meeting password: ATUG13
4. Click "Join".
5. Follow the instructions that appear on your screen.

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Audio conference information
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Conference line:
1-866-672-6771
Participant code: 0256577#

Version 8 Blending: Version 7 Blending Under the Hood [UPDATED]

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An update: Looks like this one is a bug… Tableau guru-to-the-gurus Joe Mako noted in the comments below that this behavior doesn’t occur for strings or numbers. I’d thought I’d seen this with other data types, but I was wrong. I’ve submitted this to Tableau tech support and updated the post, I’ll do another update when I hear back from Tableau.

I’ve got at least a couple more posts in the queue about various features of Tableau version 8 blending. Here’s how to run into one undocumented feature:

  • Date dimension(s) in the primary and secondary have the same name, or a defined relationship(s) in the Relationships window.
  • The date dimension(s) from the primary is/are in the view.
  • The data will blend using those date dimension(s), regardless of whether the link icon is on or off.

Click for a demonstration!

Customizing Grand Totals in Tableau v8 – The Stacking Snag

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Though I got to be one of the beta testers for Tableau version 8, I missed an effect of Tableau’s new rendering engine that affects how we customize Grand Totals.

If you’re in a hurry, here’s the key bit: In version 8, if you are customizing grand totals using the table calculation technique from Customizing Grand Totals – Part 2, set the menu item Analysis->Stack Marks->Off. Alternatively, you can use a table calc on the Pages Shelf, read on for that one.

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