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

Practical application


The first portion of this chapter was designed to demonstrate how LOD calculations work. The remainder will be dedicated to practical applications. Specifically, we will consider three typical challenges that were previously solved using other Tableau capabilities such as table calculations and data blending.

Exercise - practical FIXED

This exercise will look at a problem that occurs when mixing a table calculation that calculates the percentage of the total with a dimension filter. We will consider the problem, a workaround used in previous versions of Tableau, and a solution using an LOD calculation. After covering these three options, a commentary section will discuss the germane points of each.

Exercise steps - practical FIXED - the problem

  1. Open the workbook associated with this chapter and navigate to the worksheet entitled The Problem.

  2. Select the 2012_World_Pop dataset.

  3. Create a calculated field named Percent of Total with the following code:

          SUM([Population])...