Filters: The Heart and Soul of Tableau

If you want to differentiate yourself from a casual Tableau developer, understanding the order of operations and the order in which Tableau manipulates and filters data is critical. In other words, to be a true expert in Tableau, you need to be able to determine when and where data was filtered and pinpoint the reason when the view doesn't produce the data you expect.

Think of the order of operations as the query pipeline. The order in which Tableau filters data is critical and Tableau follows a sequential order, as shown in the following chart.

Figure 11.17: Tableau table of operations

When you create business dashboards in Tableau, you will have multiple filters, table calculations, and calculated fields to work with. As is the case with most programs, execution follows a set order/operation priority. The order of operations is just that. In the chart above, Extract Filters has the highest priority, followed...