Book Image

Learning Tableau 10 - Second Edition

Book Image

Learning Tableau 10 - Second Edition

Overview of this book

Tableau has for some time been one of the most popular Business Intelligence and data visualization tools available. Why? Because, quite simply, it’s a tool that’s responsive to the needs of modern businesses. But it’s most effective when you know how to get what you want from it – it might make your business intelligent, but it isn’t going to make you intelligent… We’ll make sure you’re well prepared to take full advantage of Tableau 10’s new features. Whether you’re an experienced data analyst that wants to explore 2016’s new Tableau, or you’re a beginner that wants to expand their skillset and bring a more professional and sharper approach to their organization, we’ve got you covered. Beginning with the fundamentals, such as data preparation, you’ll soon learn how to build and customize your own data visualizations and dashboards, essential for high-level visibility and effective data storytelling. You’ll also find out how to so trend analysis and forecasting using clustering and distribution models to inform your analytics. But it’s not just about you – when it comes to data it’s all about availability and access. That’s why we’ll show you how to share your Tableau visualizations. It’s only once insights are shared and communicated that you – and your organization – will start making smarter and informed decisions. And really, that’s exactly what this guide is for.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
8
8. Deeper Analysis – Trends, Clustering, Distributions, and Forecasting

Visualizing dates and times

Often in your analysis you will want to understand when something happened. You'll ask questions like:

  • When did we gain the newest customers?
  • What times of day have the highest call volume?
  • What kinds of seasonal trends do we see in sales and profit?

Fortunately, Tableau makes this kind of visual discovery and analysis easy.

The built-in date hierarchy

When you are connected to a flat file, relational, or extracted data source, Tableau provides a robust built-in date hierarchy for any date field.

Tip

Cubes/OLAP connections do not allow for Tableau hierarchies. You will want to ensure that all the date hierarchies and date values that you need are defined in the cube.

To see this in action, continue with the Chapter 03  workbook, navigate to the Built-in Date Hierarchy sheet, and create a view similar to the one shown here by dragging and dropping SUM(Sales) to Rows and YEAR(Order Date) to Columns:

The built-in date hierarchy

Note that even though the Order Date field is a date...