Category Archives: Grand Totals and Subtotals

Posts relating to grand totals and subtotals in Tableau.

Keeping a Value in Totals Whilst Excluding from Quick Filter List

Over at Peter Gilk’s Paint by Numbers blog there was a question on this post on filtering while retaining results. Here’s the what Jeremy asked:

May I ask if it would be possible to get a detailed explanation of applying this principle to a different type of data?

For example, I would like to see the US Sales totals, and have the ability to filter it to a US state without the ability to select a US territory (Guam, Puerto Rico, etc), but to have the US territory sales remain in the US national totals. How could I do this?

In this short post I cover two different techniques how to do this using a self-data blend and LOD expressions, respectively.

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LOD Expressions and Custom Grand Totals: Replacing Table Calculations and Self-Data Blends with LOD Expressions

I’ve been trying to figure out how to write about this one, I think I finally have a simple enough scenario to describe: In my world of healthcare delivery, I have things like different payors where I want to know what % of the population is covered by a certain payor (like Medicare and Medicaid), and I don’t really need to show anything about the rest of the population other than have the raw numbers available in the computation. Using Superstore, we can do a equivalent modeling of that using Customer Segment as a stand-in for a set of possible distinct conditions for each patient (Customer). So I want to know what % of total Sales are in a given Segment, being able to filter for any set of Customer Segment(s) I want, and show the sum of the % of total Sales for only my filtered Customer Segments. Ideally ending up with something like this:

2015-06-17 07_52_51-Tableau - LOD and Grand Totals

Read on for how this goes from relatively difficult in earlier versions to relatively simple in Tableau version 9.

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Tableau 8.1 Two Pass Totals

Embarrassment is the feeling of getting caught doing exactly what you wanted to be doing.
– Author unknown

Today I get to celebrate a new Tableau 8.1 feature and reveal some obsessive compulsive behavior. My first big set of posts on this blog were about answering a really common forums question, how to customize grand totals. With Tableau 8.1’s new Two Pass Totals feature, you just might not need those posts anymore!

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Customizing Grand Totals in Tableau v8 – The Stacking Snag

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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Learning something new every day: Annotating Subtotals

I’ve been reading Alberto Cairo‘s The Functional Art – which is a fabulous book, btw – and thinking about annotations as part of storytelling. Then Tableau Zen Master Joe Mako posted this yesterday: