Category Archives: Data Blending & Joining
Data blending and joining are incredible Tableau features! Here you’ll find tips and tricks for data blending and joining or see dashboards and dataviz that makes use of data blending or joining.
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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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Navigating Hierarchies in Tableau using Self Updating Actions
Posted on March 1, 2017 by Joshua Milligan in All, Dashboards, Data Blending & Joining, Pushing the Limits, Tips and Tricks.The Tableau technique shown here is to use an action to update an entire dashboard, including the filter selection and the view which triggered the action. The trick doesn’t have to be used to navigate hierarchies or hierarchical data, but it happens to work very nicely for that purpose. Let’s say you have a Tableau […]
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Fun with spatial files in Tableau 10.2
Posted on February 22, 2017 by Joshua Milligan in All, Dashboards, Data Blending & Joining, DataViz, Dates, Fun, Mapping / Geographic Visualization, New Features, Storytelling & Commentary.Tableau 10.2 is almost here! And it’s time to celebrate! One thing I’ve always wanted to do in Tableau is create interactive historical maps that changed based on the selected time-frame. We are fairly familiar with the shape of things now – countries, states, counties – but how did things look in the past? What […]
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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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Multiple Google Analytics accounts in one Tableau data source!
Posted on October 19, 2016 by Joshua Milligan in All, Data Blending & Joining, Tableau Forum Fun, Uncategorized.So, I previously wrote about how to use data blending to get data from multiple Google Analytics data sources into a single Tableau view. But that’s somewhat tedious and so 2013. There’s now a much better way! Using Google Sheets to track Google Analytics It kind of makes sense that Google Sheets can talk to […]
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Landmine Diffused!
Posted on May 10, 2016 by Joshua Milligan in All, Data Blending & Joining.You may recall a previous post in which I warned of some landmines in using Excel with Tableau. Well, looks like I stepped on a landmine of blogging: I was wrong! I warned that attempting to join on blank (NULL) values in Excel would not work because NULL would not match any other value. That was true […]
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Excel and Text File Landmines to Avoid in Tableau
Posted on April 18, 2016 by Joshua Milligan in All, Data Blending & Joining, Tips and Tricks.Excel spreadsheets and flat text files can be incredible data sources for Tableau. They are ubiquitous, easy to use, easy to create, portable. But, if you use Excel or text files as Tableau data sources, then you may not be aware of some landmines that can undermine your analysis. Step on one of these and […]
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Life before Tableau 9 Level of Detail Calculations
Posted on April 24, 2015 by Joshua Milligan in All, Calculations, Data Blending & Joining, Level of Detail Calcs, Storytelling & Commentary.Over the next few weeks, leading up to the Tableau Think Data Thursday presentation (register now!), I’ll take a look at some fun facts about Tableau 9 Level of Detail calculations. Today, let’s take a look at life before LOD calcs: In versions prior to Tableau 9.0, Level of Detail (LOD) calculations were not available. […]
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Tableau Mapping Tip: Geographic Drill Down
Posted on February 17, 2015 by Joshua Milligan in All, Calculations, Data Blending & Joining, Mapping / Geographic Visualization, Tableau Tip Tuesday, Tips and Tricks.Previously, we saw how to capture and use Tableau’s automatically generated latitude and longitude for custom geocoding. Now, we’ll extend that technique to give us the ability to drill up and down on various levels of geographic detail in a single visualization: The data is fairly standard. We have Regions which contain 2 or […]
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Poor Man’s Custom Geocoding in Tableau (Part 2)
Posted on February 10, 2015 by Joshua Milligan in All, Data Blending & Joining, Mapping / Geographic Visualization, Tableau Tip Tuesday, Tips and Tricks.Last time we looked at a simple way to implement custom geocoding in Tableau using the ability to assign latitude and longitude to unknown locations. That’s a fairly good option if you only have a few locaitons and only need to plot marks on a map or two in a single workbook. But what happens if […]
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Want to understand how Tableau works and how you can use it like a master?
Joshua Milligan is a three-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.
