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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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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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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A Sample Flow in Tableau Prep (Project Maestro)
Posted on February 13, 2018 by Joshua Milligan in All, Data Blending & Joining, Data Shape & Structure, Level of Detail Calcs, Tableau Prep (Maestro).I recently had the privilege of presenting a preview of Tableau’s Project Maestro (now known as Tableau Prep) to the Amazon Tableau User Group. This is not the exact presentation, but is a very similar data flow to the one I demonstrated there. The flow also shows how to replicate a Level of Detail calculation […]
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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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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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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.
