Handling Null Values while Creating and Using Calculations

Often, you might deal with data containing null values. These could be genuine entries in the data. For example, there may not be any Sales value to report against a particular product—even though it is part of the inventory, it may not have been sold yet. These nulls could also be because of some data entry errors. Most likely, you would identify and take care of these nulls at the data preparation stage. However, that may not always be the case. At times, you may need to tackle them within Tableau Desktop using calculations. Null values tend to pose a problem when used in calculated fields, simply because when doing arithmetic operations on fields, it may result in the output being null in Tableau. Refer to the following screenshot:

Figure 7.51 – A screenshot showing the Excel data and the output of the calculation on fields with null values

The preceding screenshot is a quick mockup...