Category: Tableau

Making the leap from beginner to intermediate, and intermediate to expert in any skill requires attention to small details. This includes paying attention to nuances in the way the skill is conducted. Tableau development is no different. What are some ways that a Tableau developer can hop into the next echelon of skill? I’ve compiled five of my favorite quick tips to speed up your workflow and take development to the next level.

1. Using a template workbook for common formulas, dashboard layouts, etc.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), you’ll be doing a lot of the same type of stuff while building different workbooks in Tableau. Certain things are done in many dashboards, things like:

• Certain calculations
  • Year-Over-Year
  • Year-To-Date
  • Month-To-Date
  • Percent difference
  • INDEX( )
• Certain views
  • BAN (Big Ass Numbers)
  • Highlight tables
  • Customized maps
• Dashboard layouts

There are a couple methods you can use with template workbooks to be more efficient. First, you can swap out the data source and replace fields with your desired data source fields in order to use the template workbook exactly as it is. Secondly, you can copy and past specific calculated fields, parameters, sheets, dashboards, and more from the template workbook into the target workbook.

This methodology really comes in handy when building more complex visualizations. Things like radial bar charts, Sankey diagrams, waterfall charts, etc. These can be time-consuming builds that aren’t frequently created, meaning it’s difficult to get efficient at building them.

2. Using the control key (or command key for Mac) to duplicate things and select multiple objects instead of the context menu

Did you know Tableau let’s you duplicate and select pretty much anything using the control/command key?

• Press and hold it while clicking and dragging a pill in order to duplicate it.
• Press and hold it while clicking and dragging a pill onto one of the marks cards (color, size, etc.) in order to duplicate it as a different mark attribute.
• Press and hold it while clicking and dragging a worksheet to duplicate it.
• Press and hold it while clicking and dragging a dimension in the data pane to the measure area in order to create a count of that dimension field.
• Hold control/command while clicking on worksheets, fields, or pills to make bulk actions

3. Utilize context menus instead of the menu bar

You might be tempted to create and edit calculated fields, format specific fields or elements, and do other things using the menu bar. It’s more efficient though to use context menus in their localized areas.

For example, right click on a field in the data pane and then click “Calculated Field in the “Create” menu in order to have the context field inputted into the calculated field formula window. A parameter would be similar in function. Basically a contextually created parameter would be automatically configured with that field’s relevant values as the list of values for the parameter.

4. Drag and drop things instead of using context menus

This tip is usually targeted at beginners. To remove pills from the view, there is no need to right-click each pill and then click remove. Instead just click and drag the pill out of the view to remove it. Use control/command to select multiple elements (or shift to select multiple sequential elements) and drag them off the view to remove them.

On a similar note, you can drag and drop fields onto specific parts of the view (columns, rows, marks, filters, pages, etc.) in order to get the desired visualization. Double clicking a field to add it to the view and then moving the field around can be much less efficient.

5. Copy and Paste Formatting

Make a change to one of your bar chart views? Need those changes in all of your other bar chart views in the workbook? Don’t event think about repeating the formatting manually!

Tableau offers a great functionality to copy and paste formatting, just like in Excel. Simply right click the target worksheets.

That’s it, thanks for reading!

• Why SaaS Prices Are Increasing, and Will Continue To
• Warning: The bottom 50% of BI devs will be on the chopping block
• Top 5 New Features in Tableau Desktop 2022.2
• Quick Tip: Create calculated fields from table calculations with drag and drop
• Torn between remote work and hybrid for my business

Looking to speed up your dashboard development and add a personal touch to your dashboards? I’ve got a quick and easy tip for you. Make your own custom color palettes! Tableau Desktop allows you to modify the preferences file (found under My Tableau Repository and named Preferences.tps). You can open this file and modify its code to set up your own color palettes. Check out Tableau’s great documentation on how to set up these palettes here: https://help.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/formatting_create_custom_colors.htm

You can set up categorical, sequential, and diverging palettes to fit any type of dimension or measure you’re looking to add a specific color to.

This will take forever to set up a custom palette, how can I do this faster?

I’m glad you asked! If you have your color palette defined, skip this section. Otherwise, check out two awesome tools that help you generate Tableau tps files with custom palettes. These generators can take images, have predefined palettes, or allow you to build the palette one by one. Just keep in mind, there is a limit of 20 colors on a palette as of 2020.3.

• Color by Toan Hoang of Tableau Magic
  • https://color.tableaumagic.com/
• Color Tool for Tableau by Interworks
  • https://colortool.powertoolsfortableau.com/

All you’ve gotta do is download the generated tps file, replace your existing one in your “My Tableau Repository” (just make sure you don’t have any existing customizations in there).

Bonus tip: Set the default palette to dimensions or measures in the data pane.

For both dimensions and measures, you can set the default colors for each field so you don’t have to reconfigure it on each worksheet. By right-clicking on the field, you can go to the default properties and select “Color”. Check out the short GIF I created below to see that process.

That’s it, hope you enjoyed the post!

• Why SaaS Prices Are Increasing, and Will Continue ToJune 23, 2023
• Warning: The bottom 50% of BI devs will be on the chopping blockMarch 17, 2023
• Top 5 New Features in Tableau Desktop 2022.2July 5, 2022
• Quick Tip: Create calculated fields from table calculations with drag and dropJuly 4, 2022
• Torn between remote work and hybrid for my businessMay 5, 2022

If you’ve ever developed KPIs or BANs on a Tableau dashboard, there’s a chance you’ve also implemented color indicators for those numbers. Green being good, red being bad, and gray being neutral. This color indicator might also exist in your bar charts to show YoY changes or whether a goal was met for a specific metric. These indicator calculated fields can also be used to assign shapes like directional arrows, emojis, or any other shape. Whatever the case, there’s something I see beginners doing relatively frequently (and even some more experienced developers) that is additional work for no reason.

Using the Superstore data, it’s usually something like this:

Old Way to Color Things
IF SUM([Sales]) - LOOKUP(SUM([Sales]),-1) > 0 THEN "Increase"
ELSEIF SUM([Sales]) - LOOKUP(SUM([Sales]),-1) < 0 THEN "Decrease"
ELSE "Neutral"
END

or

IF SUM([Sales]) - LOOKUP(SUM([Sales]),-1) > 0 THEN TRUE
ELSEIF SUM([Sales]) - LOOKUP(SUM([Sales]),-1) < 0 THEN FALSE
ELSE NULL
END

The first version should be avoided because it uses strings in the calculated field. Strings perform slower than integers and booleans and will start impacting dashboard performance the more complex your data and dashboards get.

The second version isn’t too bad (and the equivalent using integers as the resulting values), but still makes calculations more verbose than necessary.

So how you should you achieve this desired indicator functionality?

Using the SIGN function you can achieve the same results with a single line.

New Way to Color Things
IF ZN(SIGN(SUM([Sales]) - LOOKUP(SUM([Sales]),-1)))

It automatically assigns a -1 for negative values, 0 for zero values, 1 for positive values and null for records that don’t evaluate. You can wrap the SIGN function around your entire calculation. On top of this, I would suggest wrapping that SIGN function with a ZN function like in the example. The ZN function will return the expression if it is not null, otherwise it returns a 0 value. Essentially this will eliminate null values from your SIGN function. Sometimes the null is desirable (you want to color specific marks that don’t evaluate) and sometimes you just want to color all null marks the same as zero.

• Why SaaS Prices Are Increasing, and Will Continue To
• Warning: The bottom 50% of BI devs will be on the chopping block
• Top 5 New Features in Tableau Desktop 2022.2
• Quick Tip: Create calculated fields from table calculations with drag and drop
• Torn between remote work and hybrid for my business