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Table Of Contents
Mastering Tableau 2026 - Fifth Edition
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Do you recognize a situation where you drag and drop your fields onto your Tableau Desktop row and column shelves but somehow the visualization doesn't do what you want? Chances are that you have to turn your data, or better, pivot it. If data that you expect to be in one column, spread over multiple rows, appears in multiple columns instead, it's a case for pivoting. The following example will showcase a need for pivoting.
For our pivot example, we will make use of another dataset. You can find it at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Mastering-Tableau-2026/blob/main/Chapter03/Excel_Pivot.xlsx. The dataset is very simple and looks like this:

Figure 3.32: Excel input
It has three different colors that were observed on five different days, x amount of times. This data is a typical example of when pivoting is helpful to tidy up the data because multiple columns have the same purpose—B, C, and D are all observations. If you wanted to visualize...