Chapter 10. Advanced Techniques, Tips, and Tricks

With a solid understanding of the foundational principles, it is possible to push the limits with Tableau. In addition to exploring, discovering, analyzing, and communicating data, members of the Tableau community have used the software to create and do amazing things such as simulate an enigma machine, play tic tac toe or blackjack, generate fractals with only two records of data, and much more! Unlike traditional BI packages that force you to go through a series of wizards to create a chart based on a predefined template, Tableau really is a blank canvas and the only limits are your creativity and imagination.

In this chapter, we'll take a look at some advanced techniques in a practical context. You'll learn things such as dynamically swapping views on a dashboard, using custom images, and advanced geographic visualizations. The goal of this chapter is not to provide a comprehensive list of every possible technique. Instead, we'll take a...

Sheet swapping and dynamic dashboards

Sheet swapping, sometimes also called sheet selection, is a technique in which views are dynamically shown and hidden on a dashboard, often with the appearance of swapping one view for another. The dynamic hiding and showing of views on a dashboard has an even broader application. When combined with floating objects and layout containers, this technique allows you to create rich and dynamic dashboards.

The basic principles are simple:

• A view "collapses" on a dashboard when at least one field is in Rows or Columns and Filters and/or hiding prevent any marks from being rendered

• Titles and captions do not collapse but can be hidden so that the view collapses entirely

Let's consider a simple example with a view showing Profit by Department and Category with a Department quick filter. The dashboard has been formatted (from the menu, navigate to Format | Dashboard) with a blue shading to help us see the effect:

Observe how filtering out all the departments results...

Leveraging sets to answer complex questions

Sets are an extremely powerful feature of Tableau. They enable valuable analysis and can be used to answer incredibly complex questions.

Sets are special fields in Tableau that define a grouping of data by effectively identifying each underlying record of data as in or out of the set based on certain conditions you define.

Sets can be created in a couple of ways:

• Select one or more marks in a view, and use the Create Set option on the tooltip controls. The set will contain every combination of dimension values that made up the selected marks:

  

• Create a set from a single dimension by right-clicking on the Dimension field in the Data window and selecting Create Set… The resulting dialog box gives you the option of selecting individual dimension members (under the General tab) or setting specific conditions that define whether the data belongs to the set (under the Condition or Top tab):

  

Note

Sets that are created from marks or by selecting individual dimension...

Mapping techniques

We've touched on geographic visualization throughout the book. You've seen symbol maps and filled maps. Here, we'll examine an example using a custom geocoding technique and custom shapes to give some idea of what is possible.

Supplementing the standard geographic data

We saw in Chapter 1, Creating Your First Visualizations and Dashboard, that Tableau generates the Latitude and Longitude fields when the data source contains geographic fields, which Tableau can match with its internal geographic database. Fields such as country, state, zip code, MSA, and congressional district are contained in Tableau's internal geography.

However, if you have latitude and longitude in your dataset or are able to supplement your data source with that data, you can create geographic visualizations with great precision. There are several options for supplying latitude and longitude for use in Tableau:

• Include latitude and longitude as fields in your data source. If possible, this option will...

Using background images

In addition to using maps, you can also use background images. This allows you to plot data on any image.

Consider the possibilities. You could plot ticket sales by seat on an image of a stadium, room use on the floor plan of an office building, the number of errors by a piece of equipment on a network diagram, or meteor impacts on the surface of the moon.

You may specify images for each data source using the menu and navigating to Map | Background Images, and then selecting the data source for which the image applies. On the Background Images screen, you can add one or more images that will be shown as the background of scatterplots.

When you add or edit an image, you may browse for the image file and then specify which numeric fields in the data source are used to determine the X and Y locations for the plots on the image. Additionally, you can specify how the values of these fields correspond to the width and height of the image:

In the preceding screenshot, you can...

Summary

We covered a wide variety of techniques in this chapter. We looked at sheet swapping, dynamic dashboards, using sets to answer complex questions, some advanced mapping techniques, including supplementing geographic data, adjusting map options, and using custom images. Finally, we looked at how to use background images to create unique and useful visualizations.

There is no way to cover every possible technique. Instead, the idea is to demonstrate some of what can be accomplished using a few advanced techniques. The examples in this chapter are built on the foundations laid in the rest of the book. From here, you will be able to creatively modify and combine techniques in new and innovative ways to solve problems and achieve incredible results.