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

Diving Deep with Table Calculations

Table calculations are one of the most powerful features in Tableau. They enable solutions that really couldn't be achieved any other way (short of writing a custom application or complex custom SQL scripts!). The features include the following:

  • They make it possible to use data that isn't structured well and still get quick results without waiting for someone to fix the data at the source.
  • They make it possible to compare and perform calculations on aggregate values across rows of the resulting table.
  • They open incredible possibilities for analysis and creative approaches to solving problems, highlighting insights, or improving the user experience.

Table calculations range in complexity, from incredibly easy to create (a couple of clicks) to extremely complex (requiring an understanding of addressing, partitioning, and data densification, for example). We'll start off simple and move toward complexity...