Older But Still Useful – Conditional Formatting

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Back in May of this year before I started this blog, I did a presentation at the Boston Tableau User Group on conditional formatting in Tableau. Prior to using Tableau, I’d created some dashboards and reports in Excel, and when I tried to re-create them in Tableau I ran into a number of different issues in terms of doing the kinds of formatting, layout, and conditional formatting that are possible in Excel. I created a workbook with every technique I could find and some I figured out. Continue reading →

Unexpected Results: Rounding

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When using Tableau with different data sources, it becomes obvious fairly quickly that there are differences in what functions are available in one data source vs. another. For example, MEDIAN() and COUNTD() are functions not available in MS Excel, Access, or text data sources, but are available in Tableau Data Extracts and many others. This post goes into a case where the same function is available, but is returning different results than we might expect depending on context, and introduces a workaround. Continue reading →

Formatting Geekery – Special Values in a Text Table

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When faced with a stubborn Tableau problem, I’ll get a little OCD thing going and won’t quit until I’ve opened up a couple dozen browser tabs from searches and exhausted every avenue I can think of. This leads to success often enough that like a Pavlovian animal I keep up the behavior, even when I’d probably be better off taking a break to do something like exercise, connect with another human being, eat, look out the window at nature, drink, see my family, sleep, that sort of thing. The following is the result of one of those efforts: Continue reading →

Customizing Grand Totals – Part 3

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In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, I described how Tableau computes Grand Totals and several options for generating your own Grand Totals. In this post, you’ll learn the most flexible method for customizing Grand Totals, via custom SQL to duplicate the data.

In November 2013 Tableau 8.1 also added a new two pass totals feature that may remove the need for customizing grand totals for your use cases, more details are in Tableau 8.1 Two Pass Totals. In December 2015 Tableau 9.3 added total control for placing totals to the left and/or on top of the view.

Continue reading →