Tag Archives: unexpected results

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

5 Replies

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

1 Reply

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.

Continue reading →

Unexpected Results: Rounding

2 Replies

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 →