Tableau - Intermediate
What is the difference between a tree map and heat map?
A heat map can be used for comparing categories with color and size. With heat maps, you can compare two different measures together. A tree map also does the same except it is considered a very powerful visualization as it can be used for illustrating hierarchical data and part-to-whole relationships.
What is a story in Tableau?
A story is a sheet that contains a sequence of worksheets or dashboards that work together to convey information. You can create stories to show how facts are connected, provide context, demonstrate how decisions relate to outcomes, or simply make a compelling case. Each individual sheet in a story is called a story point.
How to add Custom Color to Tableau?
Adding a Custom Color refers to a power tool in Tableau. Restart you Tableau desktop once you save .tps file. From the Measures pane, drag the one you want to add color to Color. From the color legend menu arrow, select Edit Colors. When a dialog box opens, select the palette drop-down list and customize as per requirement.
How to create a calculated field in Tableau?
Click the drop down to the right of Dimensions on the Data pane and select "Create > Calculated Field" to open the calculation editor. Name the new field and create a formula.
What is a Context Filter?
Context Filter is used to filter the data that is transferred to each individual worksheet. When a worksheet queries the data source, it creates a temporary, flat table that is uses to compute the chart. This temporary table includes all values that are not filtered out by either the Custom SQL or the Context Filter.
How to view underlying SQL Queries in Tableau?
Create a Performance Recording to record performance information about the main events you interact with workbook. Users can view the performance metrics in a workbook created by Tableau. Help -> Settings and Performance -> Start Performance Recording Help -> Setting and Performance -> Stop Performance Recording. Reviewing the Tableau Desktop Logs located at C:Users/My Documents/My Tableau Repository. For live connection to data source, you can check log.txt and tabprotosrv.txt files. For an extract, check tdeserver.txt file.
What is default Data Blending Join?
Data blending is the ability to bring data from multiple data sources into one Tableau view, without the need for any special coding. A default blend is equivalent to a left outer join. However, by switching which data source is primary, or by filtering nulls, it is possible to emulate left, right and inner joins.
What are Extracts and Schedules in Tableau server?
Data extracts are the first copies or subdivisions of the actual data from original data sources. The workbooks using data extracts instead of those using live DB connections are faster since the extracted data is imported in Tableau Engine.After this extraction of data, users can publish the workbook, which also publishes the extracts in Tableau Server. However, the workbook and extracts won't refresh unless users apply a scheduled refresh on the extract. Scheduled Refreshes are the scheduling tasks set for data extract refresh so that they get refreshed automatically while publishing a workbook with data extract. This also removes the burden of republishing the workbook every time the concerned data gets updated.
What is disaggregation of data?
Disaggregating your data allows you to view every row of the data source which can be useful when you are analyzing measures that you may want to use both independently and dependently in the view. For example, you may be analyzing the results from a product satisfaction survey with the Age of participants along one axis. You can aggregate the Age field to determine the average age of participants or disaggregate the data to determine what age participants were most satisfied with the product.
What is the difference between discrete and continuous in Tableau?
Discrete data roles are values that are counted as distinct and separate and can only take individual values within a range. Examples: number of threads in a sheet, customer name or row ID or State. Discrete values are shown as blue pills on the shelves and blue icons in the data window. Continuous data roles are used to measure continuous data and can take on any value within a finite or infinite interval. Examples: unit price, time and profit or order quantity. Continuous variables behave in a similar way in that they can take on any value. Continuous values are shown as green pills.
What is a dual axis?
Dual Axis is an excellent phenomenon supported by Tableau that helps users view two scales of two measures in the same graph. Many websites like Indeed.com and other make use of dual axis to show the comparison between two measures and their growth rate in a septic set of years. Dual axes let you compare multiple measures at once, having two independent axes layered on top of one another.
Name the components of a Dashboard.
Horizontal - Horizontal layout containers allow the designer to group worksheets and dashboard components left to right across your page and edit the height of all elements at once. Vertical - Vertical containers allow the user to group worksheets and dashboard components top to bottom down your page and edit the width of all elements at once. Text - All textual fields. Image Extract - A Tableau workbook is in XML format. In order to extracts images, Tableau applies some codes to extract an image which can be stored in XML. Web [URL ACTION] - A URL action is a hyperlink that points to a Web page, file, or other web-based resource outside of Tableau. You can use URL actions to link to more information about your data that may be hosted outside of your data source. To make the link relevant to your data, you can substitute field values of a selection into the URL as parameters.
Explain when would you use Joins vs. Blending in Tableau?
If data resides in a single source, it is always desirable to use Joins. When your data is not in one place blending is the most viable way to create a left join like the connection between your primary and secondary data sources.
What do you understand by blended axis?
In Tableau, measures can share a single axis so that all the marks are shown in a single pane. Instead of adding rows and columns to the view, when you blend measures there is a single row or column and all of the values for each measure is shown along one continuous axis. We can blend multiple measures by simply dragging one measure or axis and dropping it onto an existing axis.
What is Assume referential integrity?
In some cases, you can improve query performance by selecting the option to Assume Referential Integrity from the Data menu. When you use this option, Tableau will include the joined table in the query only if it is specifically referenced by fields in the view.
What is the difference between joining and blending in Tableau?
Joining term is used when you are combining data from the same source, for example, worksheet in an Excel file or tables in Oracle database Blending requires two completely defined data sources in your report.
How to do Performance Testing in Tableau?
Performance testing is again an important part of implementing tableau. This can be done by loading Testing Tableau Server with TabJolt, which is a "Point and Run" load generator created to perform QA. While TabJolt is not supported by tableau directly, it has to be installed using other open source products.
What is a Normal Filter?
Normal Filter is used to restrict the data from database based on selected dimension or measure. A Traditional Filter can be created by simply dragging a field onto the 'Filters' shelf.
What are the different filters in Tableau?
Normal, Quick, and Context
What is a Quick Filter?
Quick filter is used to view the filtering options and filter each worksheet on a dashboard while changing the values dynamically (within the range defined) during the run time.
What is TDE file?
TDE is a Tableau desktop file that contains a .tde extension. It refers to the file that contains data extracted from external sources like MS Excel, MS Access or CSV file. There are two aspects of TDE design that make them ideal for supporting analytics and data discovery. Firstly, TDE is a columnar store. The second is how they are structured which impacts how they are loaded into memory and used by Tableau. This is an important aspect of how TDEs are "architecture aware". Architecture-awareness means that TDEs use all parts of your computer memory, from RAM to hard disk, and put each part to work what best fits its characteristics.
What is Tableau Data Engine?
Tableau Data Engine is a really cool feature in Tableau. Its an analytical database designed to achieve instant query response, predictive performance, integrate seamlessly into existing data infrastructure and is not limited to load entire data sets into memory. If you work with a large amount of data, it does takes some time to import, create indexes and sort data but after that everything speeds up. Tableau Data Engine is not really in-memory technology. The data is stored in disk after it is imported and the RAM is hardly utilized.
How to remove 'All' options from a Tableau auto-filter?
The auto-filter provides a feature of removing 'All' options by simply clicking the down arrow in the auto-filter heading. You can scroll down to 'Customize' in the dropdown and then uncheck the 'Show "All" Value' attribute. It can be activated by checking the field again.
What is aggregation of data?
The process of viewing numeric values or measures at higher and more summarized levels of the data is called aggregation. When you place a measure on a shelf, Tableau automatically aggregates the data, usually by summing it. You can easily determine the aggregation applied to a field because the function always appears in front of the field's name when it is placed on a shelf. For example, Sales becomes SUM(Sales). You can aggregate measures using Tableau only for relational data sources. Multidimensional data sources contain aggregated data only. In Tableau, multidimensional data sources are supported only in Windows.
Can you create relational joins in Tableau without creating a new table?
Yes, one can create relational joins in tableau without creating a new table.
How to automate reports?
You need to publish report to tableau server, while publishing you will find one option to schedule reports.You just need to select the time when you want to refresh data.
