Tableau has a variety of built-in solutions for Tableau ranking values in a data set. For most simple sorts, simply use the sort icons at the top. For more advanced cases, we use either the Tableau Index or Tableau Rank Calculated Fields. This is our first foray into the world of Tableau calculations. Using the Tableau Rank Calculated Field In…
Ori Rafael knows the pain of trying to query data from enterprise data lakes for analysis. It’s slow time to value when you can only get access to the data after having to engage the engineering team and have them spend cycles pulling something together for you. That’s why he and his cofounder started Upsolver. It makes data immediately accessible…
To tune and improve Tableau performance, Tableau has a built-in workbook performance grader that enables you to analyze your workbook’s performance. This is in the form of Tableau Performance Recording. For Excel files that aren’t too large, you probably won’t need these techniques. But as your files get larger (both data sources and your workbooks with calculations), and especially as you are…
Tableau story points are a powerful, often underutilized, feature of Tableau. Most people are used to seeing tables of numbers from Excel, with maybe a chart or two. It’s a manual process to create and maintain those, and they aren’t always done well. Further, an Excel chart can encode one or two values at the most. A Tableau chart can encode…
A Tableau control chart is a graph used to study how a process changes over time. All processes have some variability. That’s normal. But large shifts or swings are cause for study and indicate something has changed about the way your process is behaving. They are used to pinpoint sources of variation. Data are plotted in time order. A control chart always has a…
Tableau Pie charts should almost never be used. While you can build them in Tableau, and they are accessible from Tableau Show Me, they are not the best chart type to use. Your eye is much more adept at comparing lengths of bars than angles of Tableau pie slices, especially as you start to add lots of pie slices to the view. A Tableau pie chart is typically…
Tableau Gantt charts are very useful for tracking time in a process. This could be time from order to time to ship (important if you are Amazon Prime!), or time from hospital admission to discharge by patient or department, or any number of other examples. Tableau Gantt Charts are also useful for tracking progress on a project. A dual axis Tableau…
Slope charts in Tableau emphasize the start and end date changes on the data, removing all the noises and the crazy ride in between. This leaves you only the most important data to focus on. Why should you use a slope chart in Tableau? Imagine we have the following chart: How useful is this? How much insight can we pull…
A Tableau Pareto chart is a type of Tableau chart that contains both bars and a line graph, where individual values are represented in descending order by bars, and the cumulative total is represented by the line. It highlights the 80/20 rule, which states that typically 80% of the results are caused by 20% of the factors. For example, 80% of sales are…
Tableau sparklines are very small line charts, usually drawn without axes or coordinates. It presents the general variation in values trended over time, in a simple and highly condensed way. Tableau sparklines are small enough to be embedded in text. While the typical chart is designed to show as much data as possible, and is set off from the flow of text,…