Clearly and Simply

Tag: tableau software

String Calculations in Tableau

Concatenation, Conversion, Analysis and Extraction –
44 Formulas to work with Strings in Tableau’s Calculated Fields

“String Calculations” is a somehow weird expression. Calculations on texts sounds like a contradiction in terms.

Of course you do not really calculate strings. You manipulate and analyze them like concatenating texts, changing texts (e.g. to upper, lower or proper case), converting texts or parts of texts to numbers or dates, extracting parts or analyzing them (e.g. how many words or do they contain a number), etc.

If you do not have the option to do this type of things directly in your database, you will use Calculated Fields in Tableau Software to get what you want from the text dimensions in your data source. That’s why I called this post String Calculations in Tableau.

Today’s post contains a set of 44 more or less practical examples of concatenation, conversion, analysis and extraction of texts. I will not go into the basic string functions of Tableau, like LEFT, FIND, LEN, REPLACE, etc. You can easily look up how they work in the manual or read the explanations directly in the Calculated Field editor.

I rather tried to pull together a small library of 44 more complex formulas you may find useful when you have to work with strings in Tableau, like concatenate strings and a date, convert a string to a date, reverse words in a string, extract parts of a string, remove line feeds, check if a string contains a number, count the number of words in a string and many more.

The article lists and explains all 44 formulas. I do not delude myself into believing anyone would read today’s article from start to finish. It is more a reference type of post and this is on purpose.

However, I recommend having a brief look inside, even if you are not looking for a certain string calculation in Tableau at the moment. I am starting the article with a little text visualization example and I am also providing a Tableau packaged workbook (on Tableau Public ) including all examples for free download at the end of the post.

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June 13, 2014
99 Blog Posts and 1000 Comments

A Celebration Post: Looking back at 99 Blog Posts and 1,000 Comments since this Blog started

This will be an unusual post.

Not only that we had 99 articles since this blog started, we also received the 1,000th comment recently. I am talking about reader comments only, i.e. my replies are not included in this number. A perfect coincidence for a celebration post, isn’t it?

So, no Excel or Tableau tips and techniques today.

Wait! Where are you headed? Hang on.

Be assured that today’s post will not be a simple self-adulation. Well, at least not only. It will – of course – provide some hopefully interesting data analyses and data visualizations, too.

Now, starting point was the question what to analyze and visualize in this celebration post. My first idea was showing some web analytics dashboards. However, I decided to refrain from that because those numbers are embarrassingly low. Instead, today’s dashboards will focus on the content of this blog: both the articles and the comments. And while we’re on it, we will also have a look on my performance: again regarding the posts and the comments.

So please have a look inside. The visualizations are a mixture of “sitemap-like” views (allowing to browse and access all content and comments) and some performance analytics. The dashboards are provided online via Tableau Public, so you you can explore them directly here in your browser, even if you don’t have Tableau installed.

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May 24, 2014
Extract Custom Shapes from a Tableau Workbook

How to extract the Custom Shape Images embedded in a Tableau Workbook

In Tableau Software you can use the Shape Mark property to encode data in a view by different shapes. You can either use Tableau’s default shapes (circles, squares, crosses, etc.) or so called Custom Shapes. Each Tableau installation comes with a set of Custom Shape palettes like arrows, bars, currency and gender symbols and others. Have a look into the Shapes folder of your Tableau Repository to see what is already there.

On top of that, you can also add your own Custom Shape Palette to this collection. Simply create a new folder in the Shapes folder of your Tableau Repository and copy the image files you want to use as shapes (.png, .gif, .jpg, .bmp or.tiff, but no .emf) into this folder. If you then assign shapes in the Edit Shape dialogue in Tableau, this folder automatically appears in the Select Shape Palette drop down and your images can be used to encode the data.

Tableau stores the used Custom Shapes in the .twb file, to make sure the workbook is fully functional on every computer, i.e. also on installations which do not have the Custom Shapes in the Tableau Repository.

So much for the background. And so far, so good.

Now, imagine you have a Tableau workbook using Custom Shapes, but you do not have the image files in your Tableau Repository, because you are working with a new or different computer, you received the workbook from a colleague or downloaded it from Tableau Public.

What if you want to reuse the Custom Shapes in another workbook?

Is there an option to extract the Custom Shape image files from a Tableau workbook?

Not built-in, but there are two existing workarounds provided by Matt York in the Tableau Forum and on the Tableau Public Blog. Although Matt’s solutions are very smart and easy to use, I decided to add my 2 cents with a third workaround.

Today’s post includes the links to Matt York’s Tableau Shape Extractor workarounds and describes a third option of how to do the same with a Microsoft Excel workbook. As always, the article provides the Extract Custom Shape Excel tool for free download.

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May 15, 2014
Bruce Springsteen Discography – An Infographic

A Tableau Infographic – The Discography of Bruce Springsteen’s Studio Albums

After six months without any new blog posts (please accept my apologies) I felt totally out of practice. Hence, I thought starting with a fun post and an infographic would make my comeback to blogging easier than an article on a more serious data analysis or data visualization topic.

4 weeks ago I received an email from a guy (pen name: Chorizo Garbanzo) who runs together with 2 friends a music blog and podcast called Trust The Wizards.

Chorizo stumbled across a post I have written back in November 2010: Wordle Tag Clouds in Microsoft Excel, where I used the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen songs to demonstrate how to embed Wordle in a Microsoft Excel workbook. Chorizo took the lyrics out of this workbook and created a blog post showing screenshots of Wordle Clouds for a selection of Springsteen albums: Trust The Wizards – Bruce Springsteen Lyric Art.

Chorizo’s post and the fact that Tableau Software included Word Clouds in version 8 gave me the idea for today’s article: I completed the lyrics in my Excel workbook, added some additional information on the albums and created an interactive infographic on Bruce Springsteen’s Discography (studio albums only) in Tableau 8.

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June 24, 2013
Tableau Quick Tip #4 – Drop Lines

Call out positions of selected data points in your Tableau view using Drop Lines

I am barely
using gridlines on my charts. In fact I didn’t even know that Tableau Software has an option to show and format gridlines. Hence I
started the original introduction to this post as follows:

Unlike Microsoft
Excel, Tableau Software does not provide an option to display gridlines on
charts. Tableau allows you to define so called row and column dividers, but
only for categorical data, i.e. dimensions.

This statement
is totally wrong: Tableau offers gridlines (Format | Lines | Grid Lines) and
Rich was kind enough to correct this in the first comment to this post. Thanks
Rich. My fault. I apologize for the confusion.

But still:
gridlines are very often nothing else than chart junk as Stephen Few points out
in this excellent article: Grid Lines in Graphs are Rarely
Useful. Tableau has something way
more useful than gridlines: the interactive Drop Line.

Today’s short Tableau Quick Tip #4 introduces this extremely helpful interactive feature of Tableau.

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October 20, 2012