Creating calculated fields

One of the key considerations that is most often overlooked is determining the granularity of the data needed. For example, when working with geographic data, you may have values for the continent, region, country, state, city, ZIP code, street, and so on. But if you only need to report on country data, you may not need all these other dimensions. Or, perhaps you are processing order data; you may want to consider whether you need the details for each individual line item in each individual order, or whether your analysis is satisfied with the total order amount per day. In this recipe, we'll look at a quick method to help reveal the data actually in use in a Tableau Desktop visualization.

Getting ready

To follow along with this recipe, download the Sample Files 7.1 folder from this book's GitHub repository. There, you'll find the December 2016 Sales.xlsx Excel file. In the version of the sales data we've been using throughout this...