Having looked at some of the foundational concepts of table calculations, let's consider some practical examples. We'll start with some simple ones and move toward complexity.
We've been looking at table calculations mostly in text-tables because this is a natural way to think about how they work. It's also a great way to build and verify table calculations prior to transforming the view into a more complex visualization.
The following is a view of daily website traffic for the www.VizPainter.com blog. Observe that the top time series displays a cyclical up-down pattern. What causes this? It turns out that most people visit the blog during the week. Very few individuals read it on weekends.
Seeing this pattern can be useful, but it can also be distracting if we really just care about the overall trends and pattern.
To "smooth out" the chart, the second Visits field on the Rows shelf uses the Moving Average quick table calculation to "smooth out" the chart with...