Book Image

Mastering Tableau 2019.1 - Second Edition

By : Marleen Meier, David Baldwin
Book Image

Mastering Tableau 2019.1 - Second Edition

By: Marleen Meier, David Baldwin

Overview of this book

Tableau is one of the leading business intelligence (BI) tools used to solve BI and analytics challenges. With this book, you will master Tableau's features and offerings in various paradigms of the BI domain. This book is also the second edition of the popular Mastering Tableau series, with new features, examples, and updated code. The book covers essential Tableau concepts and its advanced functionalities. Using Tableau Hyper and Tableau Prep, you’ll be able to handle and prepare data easily. You’ll gear up to perform complex joins, spatial joins, union, and data blending tasks using practical examples. Following this, you’ll learn how to perform data densification to make displaying granular data easier. Next, you’ll explore expert-level examples to help you with advanced calculations, mapping, and visual design using various Tableau extensions. With the help of examples, you’ll also learn about improving dashboard performance, connecting Tableau Server, and understanding data visualizations. In the final chapters, you’ll cover advanced use cases such as Self-Service Analytics, Time Series Analytics, and Geo-Spatial Analytics, and learn to connect Tableau to R, Python, and MATLAB. By the end of this book, you’ll have mastered the advanced offerings of Tableau and be able to tackle common and not-so-common challenges faced in the BI domain.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Tableau Concepts, Basics
9
Section 2: Advanced Calculations, Mapping, Visualizations
16
Section 3: Connecting Tableau to R, Python, and Matlab

Introduction to unions

Sometimes you might want to analyze data with the same metadata structure, but it is stored in different files. For example, sales data from multiple year's, or different months, countries, and so on. Instead of copying and pasting the data, you can union it. We already touched upon this topic in Chapter 3, Tableau Prep. A union is basically appending rows, whereas Tableau will append all the rows of columns with the same header.

Understanding union

A union can be created by drag and drop.

  1. Create the union by dragging and dropping it:
  1. Or right-click on the primary dataset and select Convert to Union:
  1. The user also has the option to select the files them self, or use a Wildcard union:
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