Right before the 2015 Tableau Conference, Rody Zakovich of the Tableau community forum initiated a series of appreciation pieces to a select group of members, including me:

Community Appreciation - Alexander Mou

I am very much moved. It meant a lot to me. I have been in the forum for over a year and I am greatly impressed by the amazing energy and camaraderie in the community. The people there are great and friendly. They can help you solve any Tableau problem. They kind of act as the first line technical support on behalf of Tableau Inc. I leant a great deal by helping others as well.

As my Tableau skills got better, I started answering questions from other members. I became more active this year. Tracy Fitzgerald has been writing a weekly digest for the community.

[Update: There are a few new updates on this topic in the comment section.]

Initially Tableau published this diagram on the Order of Operations in a white paper.

Last month (September 2015), I updated the diagram to include Set Filters and called it the Precedence of Filtering. Note that I make the pipeline get narrower when going down, because all but the last filters are reducing the data set at the record level. The data set is getting smaller and smaller.
9

Scaffolding is a way to blend data. In quite a few cases, it gets the job done quite well. Thus there seems no more need to join or union data at the record level.

In recent articles, I described "Lossless Data Blending via Scaffold" and "Blending Dates via Scaffold". Both are in their simplest form: One dimensional scaffold to blend two data sources of different dimension components. The scaffolding dimension must be the superset of those same dimensions in the secondary data sources.
8

Histogram is one of the most widely used analysis methods of all time. It is my personal favorite topic to write about. In Tableau, there are a variety of ways to create it. I have to say here, Tableau is quite versatile. A good language can be used to describe an object, a scene, a feeling in more ways than one can imagine. Tableau is such a language for data visualization.

There are two steps in creating histogram:

- Create bins

- Count occurrences per bin

The concept is very simple.

During a screen share session with Tableau Zen Master Joe Mako, he showed this method of calculating histogram. Again, I am going to describe it here. This is the latest article on histogram, although I have written many on the same subject.

Will use an example I used before: Counting the number of Premier League clubs per facility fee level. There are 7 levels of facility fees awarded to 20 clubs according to the number of matches broadcast on TV.
2

This is a sequel to Lossless Data Blending via Scaffolding. The blending here is also lossless.

Date dimension is one of the most important dimensions in data structure. Most data are transactional ones with a timestamp attached to each transaction record. Needless to say, time series analysis is one of the most important analysis methods.

Let's get into the problem statement based on a simple example: two stores have their sales tallied in two tables (two data sources).
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