September 2016

5 under 5 – September 2016 5 tips and tricks that take under 5 minutes to learn

Ever wondered how to become faster at Tableau but don’t have the time to read every Tableau blog? Or

maybe you wish there was an easier way to do a table calc without spending your lunch break playing

Russian roulette with the addressing and partitioning fields? 5 under 5 is a monthly list of 5 tips or tricks

you can use in Tableau that takes less than 5 minutes to learn. Each month we poll experts here at Tableau

for their favorite tricks in Tableau that make their lives easier. They’ll help you save time, expand your

knowledge, and will generally impress your friends at your next party. Here’s our 5 for this month.

September 2016

1) Tableau Custom territories

Many of you have told us you’d like to create new geographic data using the data built into the geocoding database. And I am excited to announce you can do just that in Tableau 10 with our new custom territories!

Let me explain how it works. The first thing to know is that there are two ways you can create custom territories: by using groups or by assigning a territory field as a geographic role.

1. Using Groups

Simply select marks on a map to create groups. Rename your groups to represent the names of your territories, and remove the lower-level geography from the viz. Voilà! Your custom territories will render on either a point map or a filled map.

You can use the Edit Groups dialog to easily move features between groups. You can also turn “Other” on or off, depending on what you want to see in the viz.

2. Assigning a Territory Field as a Geographic Role

When assigning a field to be a geographic role, you simply need to choose another lower-level geographic field to aggregate on.

Let’s say you have a field called Sales Region in a table that includes postal codes. You can change the property of the Sales Region field to have a geographic role based on another geographic field. Once you do that, simply add the Territory field to a blank sheet and the magic happens. Your custom territories will draw on the map.

How This Feature Might Come in Handy

We can imagine so many use cases for this new feature. Here are just a few:

1. Show Sales Territories: Sales territories are often built on low-level geographies like zip codes, with groups of zip codes defining individual sales territories. It’s now fast and easy to construct these in Tableau.

September 2016

2. Group Multi-National Regions: Do you want to make maps of multi-national administrative regions? No problem. You can now represent the European Union with a single mark.

September 2016

3. Aggregate Postal Codes: Use calculations to create three-digit zip codes in the US and postal code areas in the UK.

4. Compare Geographic Territories: Leverage this feature’s exploratory power. Examine what-if scenarios at the regional level. Compare geographic territories with ease.

Custom territories can be used with blending and data integration, so if your business data lives in another table, you can still visualize the data you want. Custom territories will work on point maps and filled maps. That means you can build proportionally-sized symbol maps and choropleth maps, just like you can with built-in geocoding data.

You might be wondering about the difference between custom territories and groups. You’ve been able to group in Tableau for years, but those groups always sit on top of the base unit. That’s not the case with custom territories. You can build your own territories, and then use those as your base analysis.

September 2016

2) Wildcard Unions

There are different ways to create your own color palette. You can use the default Tableau Color pick, but

Hands down the most significant change to Tableau v10 is its ability to perform wildcard unions and

cross-database joins on the fly. These new features propel Tableau into serious enterprise-class

capabilities for analytics, removing the barriers and time consuming work-arounds created by data silos.

Step 1:- Create a new workbook in Tableau 10.0 and select add “Quarter 1.xlsx” as the data source from the Quarter report folder.

Step 2:- Now go to the Sheet1 and drag Number of records from the Measures to the Rows section. Here we can see that the total number of records present now is 5,000.

September 2016

Step 3:- Now move back to the Data Source tab and Drag the “New Union” button present under the sheets option to the screen. Now a new pop-up window “Union” will appear. Select the “Wildcard” tab from the pop-up window and desired files are added to the wildcard.

Step 4:- Click on Apply and then on Ok button. Now we can find a new Wildcard Union is been created comprising of all the “Quarter*.xlsx” files in that folder.

September 2016

3) Cluster Analysis

Say you’ve got sales data. Wouldn't it be great to uncover distinct groups in your customer base and

develop targeted marketing programs? Or maybe you’re in healthcare. Wouldn’t you like to identify

patients who’ve had similar symptoms when investigating effectiveness of treatments?

Cluster analysis partitions marks in the view into clusters, where the marks within each cluster are more similar to one another than they are to marks in other clusters.

September 2016

In Tableau Desktop, you create clusters by dragging Cluster from the Analytics pane and dropping it in the view.

The result is a statistical object that Tableau places on Color. If there is already a field on Color, Tableau moves that field to Detail and replaces it on Color with the clustering results.

Tableau assigns each mark in the view to one of the clusters; in some cases, it also assigns marks that do not fit well into any of clusters to a "Not Clustered" cluster.

When you add a cluster to the view, or edit an existing cluster on Color, Tableau displays a dialog box where you can:

Add variables to or remove variables from clusters. Variables are the field that Tableau uses to compute clusters.

Specify the number of clusters you want—or let Tableau determine the number of clusters automatically.

Change the aggregation for a variable by right-clicking it and opening a context menu.

If you drag a cluster to the Data pane, it becomes a group dimension in which the individual members (Cluster 1, Cluster 2, etc.) contain the marks that the cluster algorithm has determined are more similar to each other than they are to other marks.

After you drag a cluster group to the Data pane, you can use it in other worksheets. See Create a Tableau Group from Cluster Results.

September 2016

4) Data Highlighter

The highlighter is a super nimble tool for data exploration. It lets you quickly search for and visually locate

– i.e. using a bright yellow highlighter – specific data and it does it without changing the context of the

data. For example, axes don’t change like they often do when filters are applied. Data drilldowns are fast

and intuitive too – no workaround contortions or other unnatural acts required! You can also use it for ad

hoc comparisons to help spot insights. Use it across dashboards, actions, worksheets, and filters.

This new feature lets you quickly find and highlight data while maintaining the context of all the data in the view. It’s great for quickly exploring and discovering patterns.

How Does the Highlighter Work?

This feature is simple and powerful.

First, select “show highlighter” from the context menu on a discrete field that’s included in the view, specifically one that affects the view level of detail.

Then search for the data you’re interested in, either a specific mark or a group of marks. And just like that, you’ll see that it’s highlighted.

September 2016

That’s it. Now you can quickly find and compare sub-categories, see data in context, and notice patterns quickly.

You may have already noticed that in this example, color would not have been a great choice for highlighting and comparing. There are too many sub-category values, which would result in too many colors.

The highlighter control has dual support for text search and dropdown selection. You can add more than one highlighter to a viz, too.

You can also do ad-hoc comparisons with instant highlighting. Hover over items in the highlighter dropdown, and instant highlighting allows you to ask and answer questions at the speed of thought.

For added analytics or more information, we recommend using the highlighter together with reference lines and bands, mark labels on highlight, or both, as shown in the following example:

September 2016

Like the other tools in the family, the highlighter works everywhere: worksheets, dashboards, and stories. We’re excited to see how you put it to use across multiple views and in narratives.

5) Cross-Data Source Filtering Say so long to the limitations of being able to filter only a single data source at a time. For data with

common dimensions, Tableau now lets you filter across multiple data sources at the same time, applying

any edits or changes to all worksheets with data sources using the same filter.

Let’s say you’re connected to multiple data sources, each with common dimensions like Date, Product, or Location. And as part of your analysis, you want to have a single filter apply across all the sources.

That’s where this new feature comes in. Any time you have data sets that share a common dimension, you can filter across the data sets.

Let me show you how this works. The following example shows profit and sales. We have two data sources, Coffee chain and Superstore. They both contain the dimension State.

September 2016

1. From the dashboard, add a State filter to the Coffee chain data set. 2. From the “Apply to worksheets” menu, select “All using related data sources.”

That’s it. We’ve just applied a filter across several data sources!

September 2016

So how does this work? Applying a filter to “All using related data sources” adds the filter to any worksheet whose primary data source is in a relationship with the filter field. For related sources, the action creates a new filter that populates with the domain from the filter’s data source.

That’s it for this month. We hope you found these tips and tricks useful when working with Tableau.

Happy visualizing!