Tag Archives: data blending

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!

Tableau Data Blending, Sparse Data, Multiple Levels of Granularity, and Improvements in Version 8

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Tableau’s data blending feature is great for mashing up data sets from a whole variety of data sources. Want do download local weather data from Weather Underground to see how precipitation affects your coffee sales in Seattle? Sure!

However, blending can be a little tricky to set up to get the appropriate level of detail in the view, especially when you need to blend at one level of granularity and aggregate at another. In this post, I’ll walk you through a technique for doing this in v7, and how version 8 makes this process easier, using an example drawn from my own work that adds a level of complexity because the data is sparse. This makes a great case study for how to integrate different features of Tableau to create the desired view.

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