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

Directional and non-directional table calculations

Let us have a closer look at directional and non-directional table calculations:

  1. Navigate to https://public.tableau.com/profile/marleen.meier to locate and download the workbook associated with this chapter.
  2. Navigate to the Directional/Non-Directional worksheet.
  3. Create the calculated fields, as shown in the following table:

Name

Calculation

Notes

Lookup

LOOKUP(SUM([Sales]),-1)

Notice the -1 included in this calculation. This instructs Tableau to retrieve the value from the previous row.

Size

SIZE()

As Tableau help states, the SIZE function returns the number of rows in the partition. Therefore, as can be seen in the following screenshot, the size equals the total number of rows.

Window Sum

WINDOW_SUM(SUM([Sales]))

The Window sum functions (WINDOW_SUM(expression, [start, end]) can operate either...