Book Image

Creating Data Stories with Tableau Public

By : Ohmann
Book Image

Creating Data Stories with Tableau Public

By: Ohmann

Overview of this book

Tableau Public is a very useful tool in anyone's data reporting toolbox that allows authors to add an interactive data element to any article. It allows investigative journalists and bloggers to tell a “data story”, allowing others to explore your data visualization. The relative ease of Tableau Public visualization creation allows data stories to be developed rapidly. It allows readers to explore data associations in multiple-sourced public data, and uses state-of-the-art dashboard and chart graphics to immerse the users in an interactive experience. This book offers investigative journalists, bloggers, and other data story tellers a rich discussion of visualization creation topics, features, and functions. This book allows data story tellers to quickly gain confidence in understanding and expanding their visualization-creation knowledge, and allows them to quickly create interesting, interactive data visualizations to bring a richness and vibrancy to complex articles. The book takes you from basic concepts in visualization creation, like connecting to data sources, cleansing data, chart types, common functions, map creation, and publishing to the Web, to more advanced functions. It is a great overview and reference guide for beginner to intermediate Tableau Public data story tellers, and covers creation of Tableau Public visualizations of varying complexities.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
10
Index

Creating quick table calculations


Tableau Public has a feature that enables the rapid creation of a table calculation. After dragging a field onto the visualization, typically a measure, you can aggregate and perform table calculations on dimensions, or click on its context menu and select Quick Table Calculation. There is one limitation to this—table calculations cannot be created on fields that have forecasting turned on.

The following are some of the many different types of quick table calculations, though not all of them are available at the same time, and the options vary by the type of dimensions and measures that are also on the visualization:

  • Running total

  • Difference

  • Percent difference

  • Percent of total

  • Rank

  • Percentile

  • Moving average

  • Year to date (YTD) total

  • Compound growth rate

  • Year over year growth

  • Year to date (YTD) growth

Once you have created a table calculation, you can edit it by either clicking on the Context menu on the pill, or right-clicking on it. For each unique table calculation...