Ten Tiny Tableau Tips Pt. 2
Back with more tips. These are on the smaller side but I hope it helps you find efficiencies in your work. A lot of these are things I forget and then get excited when I remember like finding money in your coat pocket. Here’s a ten dollar bill in the jacket of your Tableau Desktop.
Setting Up Your View
Change Mark Type
Normally when I want to change a pill I already have in the view from one mark type to another I just drag it onto the desired one on the marks card. But it’s easier to just select the icon to the left of the pill and change it there.
Preview Tooltip
I’ve seen this button a bajillion (the exact number) times but have only put it’s use into rotation recently. It can be a little disorienting to have a lot of <Fields> in your tooltip window when you’re trying to figure out if it’s formatted correctly. Hitting the ‘Preview’ button will show you an actual example of what this will look like in your view.
Getting the Info You Need
Describe
When right-clicking on a field in your data pane, you have an option to ‘describe’ it. I feel like this is something that gets overlooked often. For dimensions, it’s great because it gives you a list of the values. This can be really helpful when working with an unfamiliar dataset. For calculated fields, it shows the calculation. I use this to get around the fact that you can’t have more than one calculated field window open at the same time.
Drag Pill Into Calc
Ever start typing a word into a calculated field window and a bunch of options come up and you’re not sure which is the one you want? I use a combination of the above tip and the ability to drag a pill into the window to save me the trouble. This might seem small but for some reason I consistently forget that I can just grab the field out of the data pane versus typing it in.
All values in database
There may be times where you’d need to utilize a combination of filters to get to a specific scenario that has not occurred yet. When this happens, it’s easy to get discouraged or flustered when you pull that last field onto the filter shelf to see that the expected values aren’t in the window. This occurs because the field is set to ‘Only Relevant Values’ by default. Click the hamburger menu in the top right to switch it to ‘All Values in Database’.
Show Empty Columns
Similar to the prior tip, this one is to help solve scenarios you don’t have data for. Let’s say, for example, you want a bar chart by month but don’t have any data for that metric for a particular month. It can be confusing to your users (or you) to have that month missing. Go to Analysis > Table Layout > Show Empty Columns to bring this month into your view. Extra tip: wrap your metric in ZN if you want to return 0 for that month.
Hide
Filtering is a great option to limit the information in your view to a specific scenario. However, you may need information or context from the other pieces that you wouldn’t be able to get easily when filtering. A way to solve this is by hiding the other pieces. Caution: you’re going to want to do this when the values in that dimension are fairly static. If this list updates consistently, you may want to add another step of creating a calculated field to return true for the scenario you want in the view and false for everything else.
Documenting Your Work
Captions
I have been using captions more often in my work lately. Not with the default information, but to describe why particular choices were made or to call out things that need to be monitored. This is a great way to add in-tool documentation to your work.
Summary
I need to take my own advice and use this one more often. I can see this being a great way to help validate information on a sheet. Similar to the caption, it can add great context to your view.
Comments on Parameters
Can you tell I’ve been on a bit of a documentation kick as of late? I know comments on calculated fields is more common knowledge but something I’ve been loving is comments on parameters. When opening a parameter, the values may be a simple ‘yes’ and ‘no’ which doesn’t provide a lot of information on the overall purpose. Add a comment to help! Also great because you don’t need to open the parameter to view it.
So that’s the stuff about the things. See you in the next one!
For more tips, check out my last ten tiny Tableau tips blog