One of my favorite chart types in Tableau is the dual-axis chart. It’s a thing of beauty! Most often in client engagements, this chart type will be used to compare a base metric with a series of user-selected secondary metrics via a parameter. The best...
For a variety of reasons, businesses do not always tie their fiscal year to the standard calendar year. There are numerous explanations of why this might be beneficial to an organization, and they all seem to lead several of my clients to the exact same...
Many of us embed visualizations in our websites, and they likely look great on our own monitors, but what about on your boss’s giant, 28-inch iMac monitor? How do they look on a projector? How do they look on an iPad? In today’s world of varying...
A common question that often comes up in trainings is: “How do I run a 'difference between two dates' calculation only considering business days?” In order to focus on business days, we need to adjust our calculated field to define what a “Business Day” is. First, we need...
Let’s take a look at the next item on our rending category. "Limit the use of detailed text tables with lots of marks." Ah yes, the fabled Text Table. Mark Counts Let’s start this discussion by reviewing mark counts. We covered this in the previous Rendering article in the...
Today, I ran into a Tableau issue that I couldn't solve through googling. Using SAML and attempting to connect to Tableau Server from Tableau Desktop, I wasn't given the option to enter a username and password. Instead, I received this message containing "errorCode=16:" Here's What Happened I was...
The first item in the Rendering category is: "Avoid high mark counts. More marks = longer rendering time." Let’s jump right in on this one. Mark Counts Marks are the points, plots or symbols on your visualization. They can be the bars in your horizontal bar graph or the...
Here’s the next item on the Performance Checklist: "Avoid row-level calculations involving parameters." Let's first take a look at what row-level calculations are. Row-Level Calculations Row-level calculations, also known as record-level calculations, operate on every record in the underlying data. An example of a row-level calculation is an IF...
Tableau does a great job of connecting to a variety of databases, but it sometimes needs help on the database end to get the results we need to make hot visualizations. One such example showed itself when connecting to Google BigQuery. The issue? Count distincts. BigQuery doesn't handle count distincts like one...
Next up on the list of ways to make your dashboards be the best they can be, we take a closer look at blended calculations: "Limit blended calculations. They require sequentially querying multiple data sources and can be time-consuming. Where possible, create a view on the...
Let’s examine the following item on the checklist: "Use calculated fields carefully. Think about the data type as you code the calculation. Number and Boolean > date > string calculations when it comes to performance." This is another item that can quickly get you into performance trouble...
Today we’re examining the following guideline: "Watch for useless clauses, e.g. ORDER BY. Tableau is going to re-sort the data once loaded anyway." Let’s get started! SQL Overview SQL, or Structured Query Language, is designed for managing data within a relational database. It is essentially composed of two parts: Data...
Currently, we’re going through the best ways to employ custom SQL and what to avoid. Here’s what we’ll cover today: "Avoid parameters in custom SQL in Tableau. Tableau wraps the custom SQL in a subquery that many databases don’t handle well. Consider building a view in the...
The rule that we’ll cover today is: "Limit custom SQL in live connections as they can be inefficient. Where possible, create a view on the database server to implement your custom SQL and connect Tableau to your view." In other environments and in other tools, using your...
It’s entirely possible that one must be a country music fan (Kenny Chesney, generally, and his song “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Problem,” specifically) to understand the reference in the title. I’ll grant that up front! But whether you are or aren’t a fan, when you...
The final topic in Filtering addresses when and when not to use user filters and how it can slow down your visualization: "Don’t be lazy with user filters. Security by user filters can impact performance on Tableau Server as the server cannot share connections and query...
.syntaxhighlighter code{font-size:0.9em!important;} The Problem During a recent engagement a client asked a question I hear occasionally regarding Tableau which basically boiled down to: "How do I show marks for the percentile ranks of my customers by Sales?" The client wanted to aggregate their measure, we're using Superstore Sales here,...
Just a few days ago, I had the privilege of attending and presenting at the latest Baton Rouge TUG meeting. As an LSU alumnus (Geaux Tigers!), I was thrilled at the opportunity. It was also great to see how much the Tableau community has grown...
We’ll continue on with the next item in the Filtering category: "Replace quick filters showing 'Only Relevant Values' and high count of quick filters with dashboard filter actions. They will cascade as your user interacts, and they perform faster." Cascading filters? Sounds exciting! I Got 99 Problems … As we...
My new favorite trick in Tableau is replacing a section of a dashboard with new content in a way that leaves everything clickable and doesn’t require navigating to a different tab. The basics of this idea were covered in the “Sheet Swapping and Popping” post...
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