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

Practical examples

Having looked at some of the essential concepts of table calculations, let's consider some practical examples. We'll look at several examples, although the practical use of table calculations is nearly endless. You can do everything from running sums and analyzing year-over-year growth to viewing percentage differences between categories, and much more.

Year over year growth

Often, you may want to compare year over year values. How much has our customer base grown over the last year? How did sales in each quarter compare to sales in the same quarter last year? These types of question can be answered using Year over Year Growth.

Tableau exposes Year over Year Growth as one option in the quick table calculations. Here, for example, is a view that demonstrates Sales by Quarter, along with the percentage difference in sales for a quarter compared with the previous year:

Figure 6.24: Year over year growth of Sales

The second Sum(Sales...