The Portals for Tableau New Features series is designed to keep users up to date with all the latest features being added to InterWorks' embedded analytics solution, Portals for Tableau.

Please note that Portals for Tableau are now officially known as Curator by InterWorks. You can learn more at the official Curator website.

Do you ever feel like your computer should do more of the heavy lifting? You had to pay good money for it, and it eats a lot of your electricity. Why should you have to work harder than you need to instead of making that freeloading box of wires and lights make your life easier? The Portals for Tableau team agrees with you. We’re doing what we can to make your computer work for you instead of against you.

If you’ve ever used your Portals for Tableau data manager, you may have had a field that was a simple calculation of other fields. If you did, you had to spend your precious brain power performing that calculation instead of putting the computer to work. We say, “No more!” Now, you can set up that calculation in the data manager to do the work for you.

We’ve added a new field for building calculations to data manager groups.

For example, if you have a quarterly sales field that is just a sum of your October, November and December sales fields, you can set it up as follows:

Now, when you are filling out the form, it will automatically update the Quarterly Sales field whenever you fill in each month’s sales figure:

Another example is if you need to concatenate (a fancy way of saying glue together) several fields, you can set it up as follows:

This will automatically glue the First Name field to the Last Name field and separate them with a space (hard to see in the above screenshot for obvious reasons, but it’s there).

Feel free to warn your computer now that there will be no more free lunches. It has to earn its keep.