Book Image

Learning Tableau 2022 - Fifth Edition

By : Joshua N. Milligan
Book Image

Learning Tableau 2022 - Fifth Edition

By: Joshua N. Milligan

Overview of this book

Learning Tableau 2022 helps you get started with Tableau and data visualization, but it does more than just cover the basic principles. It helps you understand how to analyze and communicate data visually, and articulate data stories using advanced features. This new edition is updated with Tableau’s latest features, such as dashboard extensions, Explain Data, and integration with CRM Analytics (Einstein Analytics), which will help you harness the full potential of artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive modeling in Tableau. After an exploration of the core principles, this book will teach you how to use table and level of detail calculations to extend and alter default visualizations, build interactive dashboards, and master the art of telling stories with data. You’ll learn about visual statistical analytics and create different types of static and animated visualizations and dashboards for rich user experiences. We then move on to interlinking different data sources with Tableau’s Data Model capabilities, along with maps and geospatial visualization. You will further use Tableau Prep Builder’s ability to efficiently clean and structure data. By the end of this book, you will be proficient in implementing the powerful features of Tableau 2022 to improve the business intelligence insights you can extract from your data.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
18
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19
Index

An overview of table calculations

Table calculations are different from all other calculations in Tableau. Row-level, aggregate calculations, and level of detail (LOD) expressions, which we explored in the previous chapters, are performed as part of the query to the data source. If you were to examine the queries sent to the data source by Tableau, you’d find the code for your calculations translated into whatever implementation of SQL the data source used.

Table calculations, on the other hand, are performed after the initial query. Here’s a diagram that demonstrates how aggregated results are stored in Tableau’s cache:

Figure 6.1: Table calculations are computed in Tableau’s cache of aggregated data

Table calculations are performed on the aggregate table of data in Tableau’s cache right before the data visualization is rendered. As we’ll see, this is important to understand for multiple reasons, including the following:

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