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

Function syntax


It is very helpful to click through the list of functions even just to see what the syntax is and to see some examples.

In general, functions have to be used with parentheses. The items inside parentheses are the values that the function expects when you use them. These are called arguments.

If the syntax for a specific function shows an argument enclosed in square brackets, it means that that specific argument is optional, that is, it is not a syntax error if you do not have to pass the value for it.

Note

A list of Tableau functions can be found at: http://bit.ly/tableau_fxns

In the following screenshot, you can see the function syntax for DATEDIFF. The first argument, date_part, is a common value you will need to supply for a number of date-related functions:

As the DATEDIFF example illustrates in the aforementioned screenshot, if a constant date needs to be used, they need to be enclosed in # (hash or pound) signs.

The Tableau website lists the date_part values. You can also access them from http://bit.ly/date_part.