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

Visualizing dates and times

In your analysis, you will often want to understand when something happened. You'll ask questions like the following:

  • When did we gain the most new customers?
  • Is profit trending up or down?
  • What times of day have the highest call volume?
  • What kinds of seasonal trends do we see in sales?

Fortunately, Tableau makes this kind of visual discovery and analysis easy. In this section, we'll look at how Tableau works with dates and some various ways you might visualize time.

Date parts, date values, and exact dates

When you are connected to a flat file, relational, or extracted data source, Tableau provides a robust built-in date hierarchy for any date field.

Cubes/OLAP connections do not allow Tableau hierarchies. You will want to ensure that all date hierarchies and date values you need are defined in the cube.

To see this in action, continue with the Chapter 3 workbook, navigate to the...