This is a post about getting the output you want, despite what Tableau thinks.
This is a post about making Tableau do what Excel can do (whether it’s a good idea or not).
This is a post about gaining better understanding of dimensions, measures, continuous, and discrete.
This is a post about putting bars and lines on the same chart. Continue reading
Tableau is a Swiss army knife for data visualization, with a bunch of component tools – the view types, calculated fields, table calculations, custom SQL, mapping, performance optimization, etc. As I’ve been learning Tableau I’ve been mastering new bits. Lately I’ve been exploring Tableau’s Show Missing Values feature, otherwise known as “date padding” or sometimes “domain padding”, and made an interesting discovery. Continue reading
Here’s a issue on the Tableau forums that shows up at least once per month or so: someone has a data set that they want to compute a measure over, and the measure requires table calculations. Then they want to use the results of those calculations as a discrete value for partitioning other calculations. For example, given a set of student grades, compute each student’s percentile, then show the average of each percentile in the same view. Or a similar idea, only the percentile is based on sum of sales, and you want to show the top 10% and bottom 10% of sales. Continue reading
Shawn Wallwork has a knack for starting some interesting (to me, at least) threads on the Tableau forums – like this one about the forums themselves. He posted an idea yesterday for Tableau changing the layout container paradigm for dashboards to more of a canvas GUI like other tools, and invited folks to submit their paradigm-shifting ideas. I got just a wee bit pie in the sky in my response, check out the Change to a ‘Canvas’ GUI thread for a dose of a potential future where views can be flipped from screen to screen and rearranged with the same ease of use that we have when we swipe to unlock our phones.