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

Window versus running functions


We have briefly discussed the WINDOW functions already. There's also another type of function, called the RUNNING function. The WINDOW functions have specific partitions, that is, they measure either the whole table, pane, or cell, or from a specific number of previous or future values. Alternatively, the RUNNING function compares all the values before the current value in the partition.

In the following example, we graphed the average percentage of the GDP that was from high-tech exports by region and by year in the World Development Indicators data source. This is a simple spark bar graph. We have hidden the header for the y axis in this graph.

We created a calculated field that, for each year, tests whether the average High Tech Exports as a percentage of the GDP is equal to the running maximum, that is, is the value for any year higher than all the years before it. The results are true and false, as shown in the following screenshot:

The RUNNING_MAX function...