Book Image

Tableau 10 Business Intelligence Cookbook

By : Donabel Santos, Paul Banoub
Book Image

Tableau 10 Business Intelligence Cookbook

By: Donabel Santos, Paul Banoub

Overview of this book

Tableau is a software tool that can speed up data analysis through its rich visualization capabilities, and help uncover insights for better and smarter decision making. This book is for the business, technology, data and analytics professionals who use and analyze data and data-driven approaches to support business operations and strategic initiatives in their organizations. This book provides easy-to-follow recipes to get the reader up and running with Tableau 10, and covers basic to advanced use cases and scenarios. The book starts with building basic charts in Tableau and moves on to building more complex charts by incorporating different Tableau features and interactivity components. There is an entire chapter dedicated to dashboard techniques and best practices. A number of recipes specifically for geospatial visualization, analytics, and data preparation are also covered. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained confidence and competence to analyze and communicate data and insights more efficiently and effectively by creating compelling interactive charts, dashboards, and stories in Tableau.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Tableau 10 Business Intelligence Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Calculated field window


Starting with Tableau V9, the calculated field window shows up a white, modeless window. Prior to Tableau V9, you needed to close the calculated field window before you could do anything else with Tableau. With the modeless window, you can continue to work on your tasks, such as dragging fields to shelves, while the calculated field editor is open. The modeless window also allows you to drag and drop fields from the sidebar onto the calculated field window.

In the calculated field window, you have to specify the calculated field name and an expression (or formula).This expression can include the following:

  • Data fields from your data source(s)

  • Functions

  • Parameters

  • Comments

Comments are optional but highly recommended. Tableau supports single line comments. Anything that starts with two forward slashes, //, will be considered a single line comment and will not be executed by Tableau, as shown next:

If there are any errors, there will be a message at the bottom of the editor that will show the error message. The formula itself will have a red squiggly underline to signal the error in the syntax. This is shown in the following screenshot: