If you have used Tableau for some time, you should know joins, relationships, unions...but do you know blending.
Blending is the ability to join data from multiple data sources, within the sheets themselves.
In order to make use of blending, first, make sure you have access to two data sources in your Tableau. Go to a sheet, and press 'Data' in the top left, then 'Edit Blend Relationships...'. You should get a pane that looks like this:
- Primary data source: the source your current sheet is connected to, as default, however you can change it to any source you would like to blend.
- Secondary data source: another source your Tableau sheet has access to. In this example, we want to blend together 'Blending Ex3' with 'A to B to C'. So we pick 'A to B to C' as our secondary data source.
- Automatic or Custom: this is how you set, on what columns you want to blend your data sources together. You can either let Tableau choose (Automatic) or choose the columns yourself (Custom). Custom allows you not only to pick the columns your interested in, but you can also use the year, month, etc values for date type columns.
Once you have created this, you are not yet finished. After clicking OK, you have to then go to the data sources and click the gray chain looking icons, which will have now appeared. They should then turn red, meaning the data tables have now connected together, which you can see here:
Now that your data has been connected together, you can use your data however you like.