How does Tableau work out calculations?

by Stephanie Kearns

For the last couple of days we’ve started getting stuck in to Tableau 101. We’ve covered a load of content already, finishing today with calculations.

There are three different types of calculations in Tableau; calculated fields, table calculations and level of detail (LOD). We’ve touched on LODs but I’m not including them here (Andy is saving them to cover in depth another time).

Essentially, the difference between table calculations and calculated fields is where Tableau calculates them.

Calculated fields are calculated as part of the query and will appear in the data source as a column.
Table calculations are applied to a subset of the data in a specific view and are not available in the data source.

I thought I’d share my take on the diagram Andy drew for us earlier.

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Stephanie Kearns

Mon 29 Jan 2018

Fri 15 Dec 2017

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