Practical examples of calculations and parameters

Let’s turn our attention to some practical examples of row-level and aggregate calculations. The goal is to learn and understand some of what is possible with calculations. You will be able to build on these examples as you embark on your analysis and visualization journey.

A great place to find help and suggestions for calculations is the official Tableau forums at https://community.tableau.com/s/explore-forums.

Fixing data issues

Often, data is not entirely clean. That is, it has problems that need to be corrected before meaningful analysis can be accomplished. For example, dates may be incorrectly formatted, or fields may contain a mix of numeric values and character codes that need to be separated into multiple fields. Calculated fields can often be used to fix these kinds of issues.

We’ll consider using Tableau Prep—a tool designed to shape and cleanse data—in Chapter...