Currently a formula in Tableau can look plain and a bit boring:

I would suggest highlighting the syntax words like Case, When, Then, End etc. The result should look like this:

I would also add that we could highlight the quotes so that it becomes:

When 'California' Then 'CA'

Talking about visualization ... This will visualize the difference between user-input texts and Tableau-defined syntactic words. It will make formulae a lot easier to read and to debug.

Already submitted the idea as a feature request. If you like the idea, please upvote it! The more votes, the sooner it will be implemented.

This Monday's Viz of the Day (8/22/2016) is about malaria in Africa. This topic is dear to me in two ways:

- Last year in 2015, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was given to Ms.Youyou Tu of China for discovering artemisinin and dihydroartemisinin, used to treat malaria, which saved millions of lives. She got her inspirations from Chinese medicine. Being a native of China, I am very proud of her. Here is her Wikipedia article.
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I wrote previously a post on how to count customers who bought both A and B. Today someone asked how to count those who all bought the same N items. N>=2. He specifically requires a multiple choice filter so that people can select some items and only those who bought them all are showing. (All right, the problem is paraphrased.)

In the previous post, the purpose is to map out the tallies for all possible pairs of products and to study the correlation between products.
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A viz is a piece of application software that has data as input and graphics as output. In between we created a flow of logic. We may have all experienced buggy software in our life. It is part of the human nature that we have imperfections which are reflected in our creations. So it's necessary to debug our viz as part of a creative process. Tableau is not only a software creation tool, but also a terrific visual debugging tool. We can use Tableau to make sure our data and logic are correct.

From a thread in Linkedin's Tableau group and the included blog and viz, I found that people may not know how to correctly embed a Tableau Public viz in a web page. There are a few blog posts on embedding. But the Tableau Public has evolved and some new features are not covered. So here is my post.

Tableau Public may mean a couple of things:

- A free desktop software for visual data analysis.

- A website for hosting Tableau Public vizzes (dashboards/charts/storyboards).
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This may be obvious to others, but not to me. Only up to recently, I had to

- Click Add a New Data Source

- Refill server address, port number, database name, username, password

so that I can connect to a data source that I already have. Tableau never offers the option of saving those details, obviously for the sake of security.

What a hassle! And we don't have to.

What is Likert scale? Here is the explanation.

Here is the wiki page on Likert Scale. Tableau Zen Master Steve Wexler is an expert on Likert scale visualization.

Today's Viz of the Day (8/10/2016) includes some survey data. It results from a simple yes-or-no Likert scale survey. The numbers are put in tooltips.

With a little tweak, we can visualize the Likert scale in stacked bars right inside the tooltips.

The method is explained in the lower part of this KB article.

Tableau's default labeling of Pie chart is outside of the pie. But some may prefer to put the labels inside, which is not obvious.

There are 3 ways to do it, depends on what you need.

1.Static labeling

If you only want a screenshot or for presentation only, just drag the labels to where ever inside the pie chart. You can use this technique. Once the data change, the positions of the labels will change. So this won't work for dynamic data.
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Sorting data is always a must for presenting information. Data in disorder is of little value. Especially for data analysts, part of our added value is to put data in order.

Sort by what? In what order?

There are various dimensions to order by. Among them all, the most important sorting is Sort by quantity in descending order.

This is the most preferred sorting order in any case, if no specific direction is given.

There came a question regarding "Lookup via Association". I have seen similar questions a while ago. I almost forgot how I solved them before. This time I will write it down.

Problem Statement

Given a customer who is from some state(s). We would like to see all the other customers from the same state(s). (Plural because the customer may have been migrating from one state to another along the years.) This customer and the other customers are associated by state(s).
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