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 level of detail

What does the term level of detail mean? A lot depends on the context in which the term is used. Within Tableau, we'll distinguish several levels of detail, each of which is vitally important to understand in order to properly analyze data:

  • Data level of detail: Sometimes referred to as the grain of the data, this is the level of detail defined by a single record of the data set. When you can articulate what one record of the data represents (for example, "Every record represents a single order" or "There is one record for every customer"), then you have a good understanding of the data level of detail. Row-level calculations operate at this level.
  • View level of detail: We've previously discussed that the combination of fields used as dimensions in the view defines the view level of detail. Normally in a view, Tableau draws a single mark for each distinct combination of values present in the data for all the...