#TABLEAU PREP DESKTOP HOW TO#

In case it becomes necessary though, these are some simple ways to recreate this functionality. In most cases these calculations can be easily done in Tableau Desktop in an easier, more flexible way. Realistically this method is probably not worth it to do for more than 4 values, as it becomes hard to maintain in case something needs to be changed. It’s easy to see how this can get out of hand very quickly for e.g. For a moving average of 4 values, we would need 4 streams/3 joins and an additional pair for each additional value we want to consider. Additionally, this method can quickly get out of hand. The same limitations as for the difference calculation applies, this method requires a running ID to work. Similarly this can be used to calculate the moving sum, minimum and maximum. We can reuse the previous workflow and just add an additional stream/join. Technically it works exactly like the “Difference” calculation for a moving average of 3 values, we need to bring three values into one record, add them all up and divide them by three. This is one of the calculations for which the effort grows the larger the moving window becomes. Therefore this method only works if the data set already has an ID or you will need to add it externally, either manually in an Excel file or possibly with a Custom SQL script in a database connection. Currently it is not possible in Prep to generate it automatically. This method relies heavily on the existence of a running number as a record ID. Similarly for the percent difference, the calculation should be 100 / * ( – ). Now I just need to subtract – and I have my altitude gain from one observation to the next. Each actual record ID has now the previous altitude appended to it. As you can see, nothing else changed but if I join both streams on ID, I will have the 1005 (ID_prev: 2 – Table 2) in the same row as the actual value 999 (ID: 2 – Table 1).īelow you can see the result of this join. In the “Previous Value” stream I just recreated the ID field with the formula “ + 1”. Conceptually, what we need to do is look at a value in a record and compare it to the value in the record before since we cannot write a formula which looks at values across records, we need to find a way to do it in a single record. This one is a bit more complicated and actually requires either a suitable data set or some data prep before using Tableau Prep (annoying, I know!). Because we need a common field to join on, in this case I just added a “Country” field with the value “US”Īfterwards the only thing left to do is to actually calculate the percent of total and we are done! (Percent) Difference

In the second one we just aggregate the sales figure to get the total.Īfterwards we join both streams together again to have the “Total Sales” in each of the records. We split the data set into the record level data “State Sales” and an aggregated stream “Total Sales”. To get those two numbers, we can conveniently re-use the LOD technique I described last year. In Tableau language these are two different levels of detail, one at the total level and one at the state level. To calculate the percent of total, we need the total sales value across all states in the southern region and the sales value for each of the states. Let’s assume we want to figure out what percentage of total sales in the southern region of our Superstore data each state contributed. While, in theory, you would be able to re-create all of the Table Calculations in Tableau Prep Builder, it can cause significant effort for some of them because of this I will only cover the ones which I would consider reasonable to implement and explain why others are not further down.

In particular with Table Calculations, it can get a bit more difficult quite quickly when you try to do several, more complex, calculations at the same time. It enables you to for example calculate differences from one record to another or the relationship between one value to a total and while you can use this functionality already in Tableau Desktop, you might end up in situations where pre-calculating these values might be beneficial. This makes it possible to “jump out” of the current record, take a birds eye view of the data surrounding this particular record and consider this context for additional information. While “normal” calculations in Tableau Desktop only work on a single record, Table Calculations work across any dimension of a table (rows or columns).

#TABLEAU PREP DESKTOP HOW TO#

I already described how to mimic LODs in Prep, this is now how to mimic (some) Table Calculations as well.

Some useful tools in Tableau Desktop however didn’t quite make it yet to Tableau Prep Builder. Aggregations, Joins, Pivots, etc are all somehow possible in both tools, even though the purpose and outcome of those are somewhat different in each of them.

It’s no secret that Tableau Prep Builder and Tableau Desktop share many of the same features.

Tableau prep desktop