Book Image

Learning Tableau 2020 - Fourth Edition

By : Joshua N. Milligan
Book Image

Learning Tableau 2020 - Fourth Edition

By: Joshua N. Milligan

Overview of this book

Learning Tableau strengthens your command on Tableau fundamentals and builds on advanced topics. The book starts by taking you through foundational principles of Tableau. We then demonstrate various types of connections and how to work with metadata. We teach you to use a wide variety of visualizations to analyze and communicate the data, and introduce you to calculations and parameters. We then take an in-depth look at level of detail (LOD) expressions and use them to solve complex data challenges. Up next, we show table calculations, how to extend and alter default visualizations, build an interactive dashboard, and master the art of telling stories with data. This Tableau book will introduce you to visual statistical analytics capabilities, create different types of visualizations and dynamic dashboards for rich user experiences. We then move on to maps and geospatial visualization, and the new Data Model capabilities introduced in Tableau 2020.2. You will further use Tableau Prep’s ability to clean and structure data and share the stories contained in your data. By the end of this book, you will be proficient in implementing the powerful features of Tableau 2020 for decision-making.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
9
Visual Analytics – Trends, Clustering, Distributions, and Forecasting
17
Other Books You May Enjoy
18
Index

Waterfall charts

A waterfall chart is useful when you want to show how parts successively build up to a whole. In the following screenshot, for example, a waterfall chart shows how profit builds up to a grand total across Departments and Categories of products. Sometimes profit is negative, so at that point, the waterfall chart takes a dip, while positive values build up toward the total:

Figure 10.3: This waterfall chart shows how each Category adds (or subtracts) profit to build toward the total

Here are the features and techniques used to build the chart:

  • The SUM(Profit) field on Rows is a Running Total table calculation (created using a Quick Table Calculation from the drop-down menu) and is computed across the table.
  • Row Grand Totals have been added to the view (dragged and dropped from the Analytics pane).
  • The mark type is set to Gantt Bar and an ad hoc calculation is used with code: SUM(Profit) for the size. This may seem a bit...