Last week I’d promised to explain why the solution for identifying whether All items in a Tableau Quick Filter were selected wouldn’t work under certain circumstances in Tableau version 8, here it is, and along the way I’ll explain why COUNTD(Customer Name) could be red and the “Cannot blend the secondary data source because one or more fields use an unsupported aggregation.” warning message.
I haven’t seen this particular trick out there yet, it’s a fun one for the toolbox. When we’ve wanted to mix and match KPIs in a crosstab or text table, we’ve had to resort to multiple worksheets on a dashboard in a layout container, or a multiple axis crosstab. The former can result in various display issues because Tableau imposes certain border sizes, the latter has problems with performance due to the number of separate queries and computations that are necessary.
Tableau version 8 gives us floating dashboard elements with pixel-level precision for element location, and that gives us a third way to build text tables with KPIs.
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:
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.
A Tableau version 8 tongue twister, from the SuperStore Sales (English) Extract.