Delivering reports as required by one's job duties may lead to a thorough knowledge of a limited set of capabilities, that is, a deep but narrow understanding. It can be difficult to set aside time (and also justify that time to the boss!) to explore the capabilities of Tableau that on the surface may seem to have no direct correlation to job duties. Playground environments can help overcome difficulties and objections by providing efficient avenues of exploration. In this chapter, we'll build two playground environments to help make the task of deep and broad understanding easier by providing an efficient avenue for exploration and understanding.
The first playground we will build will be for the purpose of exploring two of the three LOD functions: FIXED and EXCLUDE. We will use a set of parameters and associated calculated fields to efficiently explore how these functions work.