Category Archives: Grand Totals and Subtotals

Posts relating to grand totals and subtotals in Tableau.

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.

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putting grand total together

Customizing Grand Totals – Part 2

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In Part 1 of this series, I introduced one workaround to the issue of getting Grand Totals to show a different value from the Tableau defaults, by using two worksheets – one for the detail rows and one for the Grand Total row – on a dashboard. That method has a few limitations, the biggest being that it can’t handle Subtotals. Here, you’ll learn two additional techniques for customizing Grand Totals and Subtotals in a single worksheet, and their limitations: using MIN() and MAX() to test for the Grand Total row, and using a table calculation with a duplicated dimension. Continue reading →

Grand Total Dashboard

Customizing Grand Totals – Part 1

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Of all the questions on the Tableau forums, one of the more common ones is that people see the Grand Total and/or Subtotal rows – the ones created by going to the Analysis Menu then choosing Totals->Row/Column Grand Totals – not providing the results that they’d expect. And then, of course they’d like to have the total rows provide the desired results. For example, the measure might be a Count Distinct or an average, and the desired total is the sum of all the returned values and not what Tableau generates. Continue reading →