Last week we had our Bilot Breakfast Club on “How can your organisation become data-driven”, so I didn’t have time to write up blog post. But it’s a brand new week, and that means more things about Tableau 10! This time in my blog series “10 things about Tableau 10“, we are going to have a quick look at what’s new with Tableau’s Table Calculations.
Table Calculations
Even though these aren’t a new thing to Tableau, the way they they have been improved is worth mentioning. In earlier versions of Tableau, Table Calculations weren’t particularly well explained and easily caused a fair amount of confusion. Especially the relation of addressing and partitioning fields to each other could be confusing. Just as a refresher: Partitioning fields do what it sounds like they do; they partition your data into separate groups, each of which is acted on by the calculations. The addressing fields define the direction that the calculation takes. However well you remembered this, it was difficult to visualise how the calculations affected the data.
With Tableau 10 the effect of Table Calculation fields has been made a lot clearer with axis highlighting. In the example above, I have Sales of my different segments by Year and Quarter. By creating a Table Calculation, for example a Running Total calculation, we can see how the Compute Using affects the values. The axis are highlighted to make the flow of the calculation easier to understand.
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