Book Image

Mastering Tableau 2023 - Fourth Edition

By : Marleen Meier
Book Image

Mastering Tableau 2023 - Fourth Edition

By: Marleen Meier

Overview of this book

This edition of the bestselling Tableau guide will teach you how to leverage Tableau's newest features and offerings in various paradigms of the BI domain. Updated with fresh topics, including the newest features in Tableau Server, Prep, and Desktop, as well as up-to-date examples, this book will take you from mastering essential Tableau concepts to advance functionalities. A chapter on data governance has also been added. Throughout this book, you'll learn how to use Tableau Hyper files and Prep Builder to easily perform data preparation and handling, as well as complex joins, spatial joins, unions, and data blending tasks using practical examples. You'll also get to grips with executing data densification and explore other expert-level examples to help you with calculations, mapping, and visual design using Tableau extensions. Later chapters will teach you all about improving dashboard performance, connecting to Tableau Server, and understanding data visualization with examples. Finally, you'll cover advanced use cases, such as self-service analysis, time series analysis, geo-spatial analysis, and how to connect Tableau to Python and R to implement programming functionalities within Tableau. By the end of this book, you'll have mastered Tableau 2023 and be able to tackle common and advanced challenges in the BI domain.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
17
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18
Index

Three essential Tableau concepts

An important stop on the road to mastering Tableau involves three essential concepts. In this section, we’ll discuss each of them:

  • Dimensions and measures
  • Row-level, aggregate-level, and table-level calculations
  • Continuous and discrete

We’ll start by defining dimensions and measures.

Dimensions and measures

Tableau categorizes every field from an underlying data source as either a dimension or a measure. A dimension is qualitative or, to use another word, categorical. A measure is quantitative or aggregable. A measure is usually a number but may be an aggregated, non-numeric field, such as MAX (Date). A dimension is usually a text, Boolean, or date field, but may also be a number, such as Number of Records. Dimensions provide meaning to numbers by slicing those numbers into separate parts/categories. Measures without dimensions are mostly meaningless.

Let’s look at an example to understand...