Practical examples of calculations and parameters

Let's turn our attention to some practical examples of calculations. These will be examples of row-level and aggregate-level calculations. These are merely examples. The goal is to learn and understand what is possible with calculations. You will be able to build on these examples as you embark on your analysis and visualization.

Fixing data issues

Often data is not entirely clean. That is, it has problems that need to be corrected before much meaningful analysis can be accomplished. For example, dates may be incorrectly formatted or fields may contain a mix of numeric values and character codes that need to be separated into multiple fields. Calculated fields can often be used to fix these kinds of issues.

We will make use of the sample data introduced at the beginning of this chapter, which contained date values like this:

Start	End
03.17.2014	Oct-14

The original source was Excel and the start date was stored as a text value and the end...