Book Image

Tableau Cookbook - Recipes for Data Visualization

By : Shweta Sankhe-Savale
Book Image

Tableau Cookbook - Recipes for Data Visualization

By: Shweta Sankhe-Savale

Overview of this book

Data is everywhere and everything is data! Visualization of data allows us to bring out the underlying trends and patterns inherent in the data and gain insights that enable faster and smarter decision making. Tableau is one of the fastest growing and industry leading Business Intelligence platforms that empowers business users to easily visualize their data and discover insights at the speed of thought. Tableau is a self-service BI platform designed to make data visualization and analysis as intuitive as possible. Creating visualizations with simple drag-and-drop, you can be up and running on Tableau in no time. Starting from the fundamentals such as getting familiarized with Tableau Desktop, connecting to common data sources and building standard charts; you will walk through the nitty gritty of Tableau such as creating dynamic analytics with parameters, blended data sources, and advanced calculations. You will also learn to group members into higher levels, sort the data in a specific order & filter out the unnecessary information. You will then create calculations in Tableau & understand the flexibility & power they have and go on to building story-boards and share your insights with others. Whether you are just getting started or whether you need a quick reference on a “how-to” question, This book is the perfect companion for you
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Tableau Cookbook – Recipes for Data Visualization
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Understanding Table Calculations


Table calculations are one of the advanced levels of calculations available in Tableau. They are also one of the most powerful features of Tableau. The reason for calling them Table Calculations is because we can define the scope and direction of the calculation based on the table/view.

To elaborate this point further, let's take a look at an example. See the following screenshot:

The preceding screenshot shows the value of three products sold across three zones. The information is arranged in a crosstab manner where the zones are placed in the columns and products are placed in the rows. Also shown are the Row Totals, that is, totals for each product across all the zones and Column Totals, that is, totals for each zone across all the products and finally we also have the Grand Total, which is the total for the entire view, that is, across all products and across all the zones.

Now, if we want to show percentages instead of just looking at the absolute numbers...