Want to learn Tableau fast?

Start with this beginner-friendly tutorial where I'll show you how to import data, clean it, build your first interactive dashboard, and share your dashboard—all using Tableau Desktop.

📚 RESOURCES
• 📂 Sample Excel file to follow along (thanks Kevin Stratvert)
• 📊 Workbook

📺 RELATED VIDEOS
• Mastering Containers
• 370 FREE Tableau Tutorials

📩 NEWSLETTER
Each week, I'll send you Tableau tips, tutorials, and strategies to design better dashboards, have more impactful, and stand out in your career: https://nlt.kit.com/

🔽 CONNECT WITH ME
• Official website
• LinkedIn

If you've enjoyed my previous tutorials on 2-level and 3-level drill downs in Tableau, prepare to take your skills to the next level. 

I've got something unique for you: a step-by-step guide on creating a 4-Level Map Drill Down in Tableau!

What You'll Learn:

- How to drill down from a region to a state

- How to further drill down from a state to a county

- Finally, how to drill down from a county to a city

Prerequisites:

This is an advanced tutorial. Make sure you're comfortable with Tableau basics and have seen my 2-level and 3-level drill down videos.

Previous Videos:

2-Level Drill Down Tutorial

- https://www.vizwiz.com/2022/08/two-level-drill-down.html

- https://www.vizwiz.com/2023/06/map-drill-down.html

3-Level Drill Down Tutorial

- https://www.vizwiz.com/2023/08/dzv-drilldown.html

Links & Resources:

Workbook - https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/andy.kriebel/viz/4-LevelMapDrilldown/MapDrilldown 

If you are anything like me, you get super annoyed that the font in the selected value of a dropdown filter does not match the font of the text when you click the dropdown. Here's an example:

In this tip, I show you how to use chart icons along with parameter actions to allow users to select their preferred chart type. 

Set actions are super useful when you want to see how one thing compares to the rest. In this use case, I show you how you can click on a State and have all other States show as a comparison to the selected State.

This week's tip was brought to my attention by Zen Master Rosario Gauna. One of the really annoying things about Tableau for the longest time has been needing to create a separate dashboard action that mimics a worksheet action. In other words, you create a worksheet action, you like it, then when you add the sheet to a dashboard, the action is no longer there and you have to create it again.

Well in this tip, I show you how to make a worksheet action automatically apply to a dashboard action without having to create a separate dashboard action. Genius!

In this week's tip, I take you through how to set up basic drill down view using set actions. In the workbook below, I've included two additional views: sparklines and a region to state map.

Enjoy!

Quite amazing timing that the day Emma chooses to challenge us to understand cohorts for Workout Wednesday, I happen to be running LOD exercises at The Data School about calculating cohorts. Lucky me!

For the detailed requirements, head over to Emma's blog.

How did I find the exercise?

• Designing the charts was pretty simple.
• Create the cohorts was simple as I practice this A LOT.
• This turned into container hell on my dashboard, so at the end I was sure to remove all the extra containers that got added along the way.
• The trickiest part was getting the actions to do the excluding. Emma and I actually did it the same way for once!
• Emma and I took a different approach to calculating the "Leaving Date". I think my method is much simpler, but both work, so that's all that matters.

Some things I changed

This week's challenge started with a Convo challenge at The Information Lab from Chris Love. In Chris' challenge, he created a scatterplot that allows the user to click on a State and drill down to the City level. That is the starting point for this week's challenge and I've taken it to another level.

As a hint, in Chris' version, all cities were in the initial view, but for each State, all of the cities in that State would display the same value until you click on the State. The drawback of this method is that displaying mark labels (i.e., State names) only looks decent when a State only has sales in a single city. I want to show the labels for all States that have enough space to display it. In other words, the initial view should show only one dot per State, then when you drill down, you will see one dot per City in the selected State.

Before you start, I would highly encourage you to interact with the viz below to see how the drill down works.

Using this data source, here are the requirements:

1. Create a scatterplot of sales vs. profit.
2. In the initial view, you should see only one dot for each State. If you do this part right, you will have 48 marks in the view.
3. Label the dots for the States in the initial view where the labels fit (using Tableau's automatic labelling).
4. If you click on one of the States, then the view should automagically drill down to the cities for the selected State.
5. If you choose more than one State, then the drill down should be disabled.
6. Once you are in the City view, you should see one dot for each city. For example, if you click on Washington, then the City view should have 40 marks (one for each City).
7. At the City level, the user should be able to click on the white space in the chart to go back to the State level.
8. At the City level, no cities should be highlighted.
9. You must match the tooltips. They show the State, Sales and Profit when each dot is a State. The tooltip shows the City, Sales and Profit when each dot is a City.
10. The title and subtitle should change depending on if the view is State level or City level.
11. Each dot should be colored by profit ratio for the State or City.
12. The view should be 600x650.

Be sure to tweet an image of your work and a Tableau Public link and tag @EmmaWhyte and @VizWizBI. Good luck! I guarantee you'll learn a lot this week.

Eva and I are hosting another BrightTalk webinar this Friday titled "Visualizing Smart Cities: How Data can help shape our communities". This is part of an Internet of Things week for BrightTalk so when deciding what data set to pick for this week, I got to thinking about air quality sensors. A quick google search turned up a treasure trove of data on the EPA website. Thanks for my friends over at Exasol, I was able to create a place for all of us to play with all 202 million hourly measurements. If you want to play with the live connection to all 202M records, you will need a login which you can create via this registration if you do not already have one.

The EPA website also contained some basic reporting, which is the focus for this week's makeover.

What works well?

Last night at the SFBATUG meet up, I had the pleasure of giving a hands-on demo of how to create an interactive calendar in Tableau.  This is a follow up to a post I write in May 2012 detailing how to create the calendar. 

This example goes a step farther in that I’m using the calendar like a widget to control what I’m seeing on my dashboard.  What’s also cool about this method is that you can multi-select dates, something you can’t currently do with date quick filters.

Note that I also demoed how to hide a reference line behind a bar, which I wrote about here.

Finally, this dashboard is not a stellar example of design.  I threw this together quickly so that I could share it with the community promptly.

Download the workbook here.

UPDATE 8/9/2016: This issue has been fixed and release in version 9. No more ubertips if you turn off tooltips for a worksheet!!

While working on a project this past week, I noticed a bug in Tableau with tooltips when there are dimensions in the rows or columns. Consider a dashboard that looks something like this:

Now, perhaps I don’t want to show the tooltip on the bar chart (e.g., maybe it’s sensitive data or something). I highlight the sheet, choose Worksheet => Tooltip from the menu and I clear everything from the tooltip and uncheck the “Include command buttons” option.

Great! I’ve removed the tooltip. When I hover over one of the bar, I don’t see anything. But now comes the bug.

Perhaps I want to use this sheet as a filter, so I turn that on. Now I click on one of the rows, like Coffee in the South because it’s behind budget. Low and behold, I see a tooltip.

And worse yet, I can see the underlying data (notice the table icon). Try it yourself. Go ahead and click on one of the rows.

Before you completely freak out that your sensitive data is now available to everyone, I tested this on Tableau Server and if you deny the View Summary Data and View Underlying Data options, the table icon that we see in the tooltip does not appear. However, the Include and Exclude options DO still appear. An astute interactor can probably figure out a way to drill down until they see something they shouldn’t.

I submitted a bug for this, but have not received confirmation or a ticket number yet. Hopefully this gets fixed immediately. After all, when you hide the tooltip, you expect to hide the tooltip.

---

UPDATE 7/31/2013:

It's completely ridiculous in my opinion that neither (1) the ubertip doesn't work with the regular tooltip nor (2) you have no control over the ubertip at all. This needs to be voted up in the ideas queue.

http://community.tableausoftware.com/ideas/2425

From Tableau Support:
"I understand that the tooltip command buttons have been disabled in a view. When clicking on a mark or data item in the view, the buttons do not appear, but when clicking on a column or row header (dimension) the buttons do appear.

This functionality is expected when clicking on row or column headers. These tooltips are called ubertips and are different from the tooltips displayed when clicking on a data mark. This functionality is the same in Tableau Desktop 7.0 and 8.0. At this time the ability to disable the command buttons on ubertips is not functionality built into the product."

Global filters in Tableau are often one of your best friends, especially when building interactive dashboards that span multiple worksheets.  However, if you have multiple data sources and multiple worksheets, global filters do not apply to all of your worksheets.

Yes, you can use actions, but this can easily become confusing for the user when switching worksheets.  But wouldn’t it be great to have a global filter work across all of the data sources?  Use this technique and you’ll get what you always hoped for.

In this example, assume you have three disparate data sources each with its own dashboard.

There is also a dimension named Location in all of the data sources.  Note that this dimension does not have to be named the same in every data source for this technique to work.

At this point, if I add the Location dimension to the Sales worksheets and set it to a global filter, the filter will not get applied to the Shipping and Capacity dashboards because they are not from the same data source. 

To make a “global filter” apply to all of the dashboards/worksheets, follow these steps.

Step 1 – Drag the Location dimension onto the filter shelf of one worksheet for each data source and choose the Use All option.

Step 2 – Make the Location field a Global filter on each data source

Remember, you must repeat steps 1 & 2 for one sheet of each data source.

Step 3 – Create a parameter named Location (or any name you’d like) with the following settings.

Of course, your list of values will need to be relevant to your data.

Step 4 – Create a calculated field that will determine if the Location dimension equals the value chosen in the Location parameter.

Step 5 – Copy/Paste this formula across all of the data sources.  You should now have the Location Flag calculated field in the Dimensions list of each data source.

Step 6 - Drag the Location Flag dimension onto the filter shelf of one worksheet for each data source and choose True.

Step 7 – Make the Location Flag a Global filter on each data source

Step 8 – Show the Location parameter in each dashboard and place it on the dashboard wherever you prefer.

The Location parameter now acts like a Compact List quick filter.  Your final workbook should look like this:

Choose a different Location, then flip to another tab.  You will see the dashboard update based on the new Location.  Change it back if you don’t believe me.

In this example, I did not want to allow the user to pick “All” as an option in the Location parameter.  Instead I wanted them to be forced to pick only one Area.  You could include an All option through a few more calculated fields.

If you love soccer, then it’s likely that you follow the EPL.  My favorite team?  ARSENAL!  Did you see the incredible goal by RVP Saturday against Everton? You may never see better technique and now he’s only one goal behind Thierry Henry’s team record for goals in a calendar year.  Please Lord, keep RVP healthy for a full season!

And if you love soccer and you love stats, then check out Soccer by the Numbers. Chris Anderson writes many quality posts and recently he blogged about points and relegation.  I wanted to take Chris’ ideas a step farther.  I needed a richer dataset than what Chris was able to provide, so I downloaded the final tables (i.e., standings) from the EPL back to the 2001-02 season from ESPNSoccernet. You can download the full dataset here.

I borrowed (or is it stole?) Steve Wexler’s technique for providing instructions (hover over the EPL logo to see what I mean).  There’s lots of interactivity in the viz, so first check out the instructions, then start clicking around. 

Answer this: How many teams have qualified for the Champions League with a negative goal differential?  Who were they? What else can you tell me about the team(s)?  Post your answer in the comments.