Advanced Tableau Calculations You Really Need to Know
Let’s take a look at some of the most important Tableau Calcs that will help you do your job better and deliver insights at a deeper level.
Corr
Corr is powerful for a lot of reasons. Mainly it helps find correlation. Which is important for finding values that have relationships. It can also find patterns in your data that otherwise would be extremely challenging to obtain. See example below:
CORR(expression1, expression2)
-- Calculates the Pearson correlation coefficient between two fields.
-- Example: To identify the relationship between Sales and Profit:
CORR(Sales, Profit)
-- A result close to 1 or -1 indicates a strong relationship.
Covar
This may not be as known much. This helps find values that move in the same direction. You can see how this calculation can help figure out stuff that would seemingly be impossible otherwise. See the example below:
-- COVAR(expression1, expression2)
-- Computes the covariance between two fields.
-- Example: To see how Sales and Marketing Spend vary together:
COVAR(Sales, MarketingSpend)
-- Positive values mean they tend to increase together.
STDEV
It may seem that standard deviation is just so simple. With that being said. It would just be wrong to not mention this Tableau calculation as not being important. It also could be considered advanced. If looking to see how values are different from the average. This can be an incredible calculation to find outliers and trends in your data. See the example below of how to use the calculation.
-- STDEV(expression)
-- Gives the standard deviation of a sample.
-- Example: To understand the variation in daily sales:
STDEV(Sales)
-- Indicates how much sales amounts deviate from the average.
VAR
This is the next step in Standard Deviation. With that being said it drops the value to a simple. The difference is it squares the deviations to get a simple view of the swings in your data from the average. See the example below:
-- VAR(expression)
-- Calculates the variance of a sample.
-- Example: To find the variance in monthly profit:
VAR(Profit)
-- Similar to STDEV, but it squares the deviations before averaging.
In the End
In the end these Tableau Calculations will help you figure out how data moves and relates easily. This will help give you a good understanding of your data. So you can deliver the insights that are needed.
