Creating basic calculations in Tableau

With data, you can often build visualizations with basic measures and dimensions. To add context, insight, and further clean the data, calculations are needed. For the examination, you do not need to be a calculations master, but you need to understand what basic calculations are and what they represent. This is what we will look at in the following subsections.

Creating a (blank) calculated field

You should select the down arrow shown in Figure 5.1 and then click on Create Calculated Field… to start building a calculation:

Figure 5.1 – Creating a calculated field in Tableau: this will create a blank calculation template

Tip

If you know which field you want to base a calculation on, then right-click on that field and select Create | Calculated Field… to get the field to show up immediately in the calculation. See Figure 5.2 for an example.

Figure 5.2 –...