Book Image

Mastering Tableau

By : David Baldwin
Book Image

Mastering Tableau

By: David Baldwin

Overview of this book

Tableau has emerged as one of the most popular Business Intelligence solutions in recent times, thanks to its powerful and interactive data visualization capabilities. This book will empower you to become a master in Tableau by exploiting the many new features introduced in Tableau 10.0. You will embark on this exciting journey by getting to know the valuable methods of utilizing advanced calculations to solve complex problems. These techniques include creative use of different types of calculations such as row-level, aggregate-level, and more. You will discover how almost any data visualization challenge can be met in Tableau by getting a proper understanding of the tool’s inner workings and creatively exploring possibilities. You’ll be armed with an arsenal of advanced chart types and techniques to enable you to efficiently and engagingly present information to a variety of audiences through the use of clear, efficient, and engaging dashboards. Explanations and examples of efficient and inefficient visualization techniques, well-designed and poorly designed dashboards, and compromise options when Tableau consumers will not embrace data visualization will build on your understanding of Tableau and how to use it efficiently. By the end of the book, you will be equipped with all the information you need to create effective dashboards and data visualization solutions using Tableau.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Mastering Tableau
Credits
About the Author
www.Packtpub.com
Preface

What is the function?


As discussed in the introduction to this chapter, it may be helpful to enhance your understanding of table calculations via the following two questions: What is the function? and How is the function applied?

We will begin by considering how each table calculation function can be considered directional or non-directional.

Directional and non-directional

As of Tableau 10, there are 32 table calculation functions in Tableau. However, many of these are simply variations of a theme; for example, there are five Running functions, including RUNNING_SUM and RUNNING_AVG. If we narrow our consideration to unique groups of table calculations functions, we will discover that there are only 11. The following table shows these 11 functions organized in two categories:

Directional table calculation functions

Non-directional table calculation functions

LOOKUP

SCRIPT_STR functions

PREVIOUS VALUE

SIZE

RUNNING functions

TOTAL

WINDOW functions

FIRST

INDEX

...