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

Overview of advanced fixes for data problems

In addition to the techniques that we mentioned earlier in this chapter, there are some additional possibilities to deal with data structure issues. It is outside the scope of this book to develop these concepts fully. However, with some familiarity of these approaches, you can broaden your ability to deal with challenges as they arise:

  • Custom SQL: It can be used in the data connection to resolve some data problems. Beyond giving a field for a cross-database join, as we saw earlier, custom SQL can be used to radically reshape the data that's retrieved from the source. Custom SQL is not an option for all data sources, but it is an option for many relational databases. Consider a custom SQL script that takes the wide table of country populations we mentioned earlier in this chapter and restructures it into a tall table:
    SELECT [Country Name],[1960] AS Population, 1960 AS Year 
    FROM Countries 
     
    UNION ALL 
     
    SELECT...