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

The four basic data transformations

In this section, we'll give you an overview of some basic transformations that can fundamentally change the structure of your data. We'll start with an overview and then look at some practical examples.

Overview of transformations

In Tableau (and Tableau Prep), there are four basic data transformations. The following definitions broadly apply to most databases and data transformation tools, but there are some details and terminology that are Tableau-specific:

  • Pivots: This indicates the transformation of columns to rows or rows to columns. The latter is possible in Tableau Prep only. The resulting dataset will be narrower and taller with fewer columns and more rows (columns to rows) or wider and shorter with more columns and fewer rows (rows to columns).
  • Unions: This indicates the appending of rows from one table of data to another, with the matching columns aligned together. The resulting data structure is a single...