Category Archives: Calculations
Calculations in Tableau are Powerful! These posts either deal extensively with calculations or demonstrate techniques that use calculations.
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Rank and Ranking in Tableau Prep
Posted on June 15, 2018 by Joshua Milligan in All, Calculations, Data Blending & Joining, Data Shape & Structure, Tableau Prep (Maestro), Tips and Tricks.One thing I’ve submitted an idea for Tableau Prep (and would love if you voted for it!) is the ability to use Table Calculations, especially Index() and PreviousValue(). This would solve a lot of use cases, including adding row numbers, rank, sort, handling cumulative values, and more. But to compute a rank or sort specifically, […]
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Great Circles & Curved Flight Paths: Tableau & SQL Server Geospatial
Posted on June 8, 2018 by Joshua Milligan in All, Calculations, Mapping / Geographic Visualization, New Features.How can you leverage SQL Server geospatial tools in Tableau to draw cool curved flight paths (or any great arcs)? I’m glad you asked! When I first started learning Tableau, one of the most difficult things I encountered was the Path shelf. I just didn’t get it. Why would lines break when you placed certain […]
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How to remove duplicate records in Tableau Prep
Posted on May 23, 2018 by Joshua Milligan in All, Calculations, Data Shape & Structure, Level of Detail Calcs, Tableau Prep (Maestro), Tips and Tricks, Uncategorized.One of the questions that comes up quite often is “How do I remove duplicate records in Tableau Prep?” or “How do I dedup data in Tableau Prep?” Some data preparation tools have a specific feature to do this. At first glance, the first version of Tableau Prep doesn’t seem to have this feature. BUT […]
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Draw circles with exact distance radius on maps in Tableau
Posted on April 24, 2018 by Joshua Milligan in All, Calculations, DataViz, Mapping / Geographic Visualization, New Features, Tips and Tricks.Tableau 2018.1 introduces a lot of new features, especially geospatial features that open a whole new world of data exploration and analysis. With support for SQL Server geospatial data types, there are near-infinite possibilities. I’m sure I’ll have more than a few posts on various options soon! Here’s one thing you can do: render circles […]
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Unpivot in Tableau Prep (Rows to Columns)
Posted on April 23, 2018 by Joshua Milligan in All, Calculations, Data Blending & Joining, Data Shape & Structure, Tableau Prep (Maestro).You know you have a great piece of software when you can use its paradigm to come up with workarounds to features that don’t yet exist. Such is the case with Tableau Prep (formerly Project Maestro). I recently needed to unpivot some data and realized, the Tableau devs are truly miracle workers! Unpivot Data – […]
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Cross Database Union & the other MAX/MIN functions in Tableau
Posted on March 12, 2018 by Joshua Milligan in All, Calculations, Data Blending & Joining, Data Shape & Structure, Tips and Tricks.Cross database joins have been available in Tableau for a while now – and I love the ability to join data at a row-level across various databases and files! And union functionality is available, but for now, only if you are dealing with tables in the same database (or files or Excel tabs). But what […]
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Latest Snapshot in Tableau and Tableau Prep (Maestro)
Posted on February 1, 2018 by Joshua Milligan in All, Calculations, Data Blending & Joining, Data Shape & Structure, Level of Detail Calcs, Tableau Prep (Maestro).Often, you’ll have data that looks something like this: Every day, there are new records for projects that give the latest status and count of hours used. Often a project spans multiple days and the status can change and count of hours might go up. But if I want to get the most recent […]
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Hot Swapping Geographic Levels of Detail in a Tableau Viz
Posted on November 13, 2017 by Joshua Milligan in All, Calculations, Data Blending & Joining, Data Shape & Structure, DataViz, Mapping / Geographic Visualization, New Features.I used to think you couldn’t hot-swap geographic levels of detail in a Tableau visualization. And, before Tableau 10, you couldn’t. I mean, of course in Desktop or web authoring mode you can drag and drop fields, but for the end-user of a dashboard that wasn’t an option. You might have thought to use […]
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Reshaping your data right in Tableau: Materialized Path Hierarchies
Posted on April 17, 2017 by Joshua Milligan in All, Calculations, Data Blending & Joining, Data Shape & Structure, Tips and Tricks.I recently came across this post by Simona Loffredo in which she describes a certain type of data structure, why it wasn’t ideal for analysis, and how to reshape it using Alteryx. While I love Alteryx and really love how it can be used alongside Tableau, I get especially excited when I can do something without […]
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Periodic Snapshots with Tableau Incremental Refresh
Posted on January 3, 2017 by Joshua Milligan in All, Calculations, Data Blending & Joining, Dates, Level of Detail Calcs.Happy New Year! Even as 2016 was winding down, I found myself with a challenge dealing with time. And I thought I’d share some of my thoughts about a possible approach. Here’s the challenge: You have a database with transactional data, that is data where the rows are inserted, updated and deleted based on events. […]
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Joshua Milligan is a four-time Tableau Zen Master. His passion is training, mentoring, and helping people gain insights and make decisions based on their data through data visualization using Tableau.
He is a principal consultant at Teknion Data Solutions, where he has served clients in numerous industries since 2004.
Joshua served as technical reviewer on several Tableau titles and is the author of the book Learning Tableau.
