Vizible Difference

[This is #TweakThursday series No.44, a series of viz critiques.]

Tableau Zen Master Ken Flerlage published 20 use cases of Level of Details or LOD a few days ago. I am quite curious as to how different it is to implement them without LOD. So I recreated 19 of 20 examples using simple aggregations or table calculations. Here is the workbook that contains both Ken's original LOD examples and my non-LOD calculations. Hover on the charts to view and compare the formula in LOD and non-LOD.

The main takeaways from these exercises are:

1.In general, LOD and non-LOD are both possible options to implement almost any calculation. One can use either depending on one's mastering of either technique.

2.One can be better than the other depending on use cases.

Nested sorting used to be difficult to many people. Hierarchical nested sorting is even more difficult.

What is (regular) nested sorting and what is hierarchical nested sorting?

Regular nested sorting is regarding multiple dimensions and one measure. Say we have all of them on the row and we need to sort the rightmost dimension by the measure. That is the nested sorting as shown below. Usually it is regarding a static table. This can be easily done by clicking the sort button on the tool menu.

I am shown a 3D bar chart (via custom shapes) by some people. It is created the talented Toan Hoang at Tableau Magic. Here I re-created the same chart using a little different approach, without extra file and joins.

1.Download the custom shapes (cube pictures) from the above web page and save them into My Document\Tableau Repository\Shapes\Cubes folder. (You can use my workbook below and steal them if you wish).

2.Import the data source and union it with itself as shown below.