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

Introduction to calculations

A calculation is often referred to as a Calculated Field in Tableau because, in most cases, when you create a calculation, it will show up as either a new measure or dimension in the data pane. Calculations consist of code that's made up of functions, operations, and references to other fields, parameters, constants, groups, or sets. This code returns a value. Sometimes, this result is per row of data, and sometimes it is done at an aggregate level. We'll consider the difference between Tableau's major calculation types next.

The four main types of calculations

The most fundamental way to understand calculations in Tableau is to think of four major types of calculations:

  • Row-level calculations: These calculations are performed for every row of underlying data.
  • Aggregate calculations: These calculations are performed at an aggregate level, which is usually defined by the dimensions used in the view.
  • Level of...