Advance with Assist shares quick solutions to common challenges encountered by the InterWorks Assist on-demand team.

Question: I know I’m doing something wrong. When building views, my alias in one view overwrites my alias in another. I know I’m missing something here. Can you fill in what I’m missing?

When building reports, sometimes you need a different header name. Right-clicking the header will sometimes reveal a menu option for Edit Alias:

This allows you to create an alias on the report tied to the data source. In this case, we are tying the alias to the measure Discount. We’ll call it Region Discount since I’m building a report for regions:

Now back to the question at hand. To show what she was seeing, I created another report where I needed the alias to be State Discount. However, when I try to edit the alias here, I see Region Discount in the Edit menu, and not just Discount. This is because you are only allowed to edit the alias once, as it’s tied to the measure here and not the report.

If you needed different aliases for different reports, you have a couple options.

Option 1: Duplicating the Measure

Since you are creating another measure, you will have the ability to create a second alias:

Option 2: Spaces in Aliases

Sometimes you need the same alias on multiple measures. Tableau will not allow you to have the same alias on multiple:

The way around this message is to add a <space> at the end of the alias. As you can see below, the aliases are the same, but the data is different. The only difference is the space.